Airtel alleges Reliance Jio of gaming interconnect usage patterns

Airtel has accused Reliance Jio of gaming the incoming and outgoing calling pattern to shift the interconnect usage charge system to its advantage.

Airtel officials said that RJio had reduced the ringing time for outgoing calls to other networks (from 45 to 20 seconds only) leading to a lot of customer inconvenience since the calls are cut-off even before the receiving customer had the time to pick it up.

“Seeing a missed call the receiving customer calls back to the originating operator’s network. By converting such outgoing calls to incoming calls, one large operator is not only getting IUC from other operators but also trying to reduce the asymmetry of traffic artificially. This is to show symmetry in traffic in the run-up to the proposed implementation of zero IUC from January 2020,” said an Airtel official.