Interconnection Agreements TRAI makes rules stricter by mandating 30 day d eadline for
0Interconnection Agreements TRAI makes rules stricter by mandating 30-day d.eadline for operators.
Months after the debate over provision of enough points of interconnection between the existing telecom companies and new entrant Reliance Jio, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has made the network connectivity rules stricter by mandating a 30-day deadline for mobile operators to sign interconnection agreements on a non-discriminatory basis. The regulator has also fixed a daily penalty of up to Rs 1 lakh per service area for violations of the new norms.
The ‘Telecom Interconnection Regulations 2018’, which come into effect from February 1, assume importance considering the tussle between incumbents and Reliance Jio that happened in 2016, when the latter accused the large and established players such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular of not providing enough points of interconnect on their networks. This allegedly led to massive call failures for Jio subscribers.
On the other hand, the older operators blamed the free calls offered by Jio for the skew in call traffic.
In its latest regulations, the telecom watchdog has said that “every service provider shall, within thirty days of receipt of request from a service provider, enter into interconnection agreement, on non-discriminatory basis, with such service provider”. Further, it has stipulated a period of five days for service providers to respond to interconnection seekers with a draft interconnect pact. The existing norms did not mandate an explicit timeline for signing of interconnect pacts between two telecom service providers. Mobile operators enter into interconnection agreements to allow callers subscribed to one network make calls to a subsriber on another.