Telcos pull the plug on call support for Reliance Jio as Jio’s ‘free service’mobile partnerships grow rapidly

The infighting between telcos and Mukesh Ambani led Reliance Jio is turning out to be the biggest slugfest in the Indian telecom industry. And now Jio has partnered with 19 smartphone makers lapping up over 3million subscribers even before its commercial launch. This is not going down well with the telcos, we spoke to industry body COAI who is of the view that Jio is playing an unfair game and COAI members (including Airtel, Vodafone, Idea) will no longer extend their interconnect capacity to Jio as they don’t consider Jio as a full fledge telecom operator until they stop their free trial testing and commercially launch their services.

Mukesh Ambani announced the testing of Reliance Jio services on December 27th, which incidentally is Dhirubhai Ambani's birth anniversary. The test started with employees only free trial offer but soon it was extended to retail consumers through a bundled offer with Jio's range of Lyf mobiles. And now, Jio’s 90 days free trial offer can be availed with the purchase of 19 smartphone brands including Samsung, LG, Panasonic, ASUS, Gionee, Karbonn, Lava, Xolo, Videocon, Sansui, Sony, Micromax, YU, Alcatel, TCL, Vivo, Intex and HTC. This fast growing Jio’s ‘free service’ partnership with smartphone makers is adding more fire to the never ending war of words with the existing telecom operators in the country over Jio's trial offer. Telecom operators have written to the top govt offices including the PMO about Jio's three month free trial offer and how it's helping Jio poach their customers.

Now with Jio growing bigger by the day without having launched their services commercially, telcos have taken a stern stand to stop providing any further interconnect capacity to Relaince Jio. This move can potentially hurt Reliance Jio’s voice services as it is already a huge concern for Jio “It would clearly not be prudent for RJIL to contemplate launching of commercial services with this level of call failures” Jio had said. While telecom operators like Airtel, Vodafone, Idea have claimed that they have provided Jio with enough interconnect capacity to meet the usual demand of 15 to 20 million customers and now the industry will not extend the interconnect capacity any further until Jio enters the market as a full-fledge telecom player. With the growing number of Jio subscribers this could lead to a huge concern for Reliance Jio and not to mention yet another spark in this never ending battle.