Idea hasn't violated service norms on PoIs: Himanshu Kapania

KOLKATA: Idea Cellular managing director Himanshu Kapania said the country's No 3 mobile carrier has not violated any quality of service (QoS) norms on the issue of providing points of interconnection (PoIs) to Reliance Jio Infocomm, and would shortly approach the department of telecommunications (DoT) on the matter.
Kapania said Idea has “complete legal opinion that there is no violation“ on the matter. He was responding to analysts' concerns in the aftermath of the Rs 950-crore penalty recently slapped by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on the company for allegedly denying adequate interconnection points to Jio.

Idea, he said, had significantly boosted additional capacity to Jio in the shortest possible span, adding that over 2,000-odd interconnection points were in the execution stage as a lot of work was still pending at the Mukesh Ambani-run 4G entrant's end.

Kapania's comments came under a we ek after Trai slapped a combined penal Rs 3,050 crore on the Big 3 of Indian telecom -Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular -accusing them of flouting licence norms in denying adequate interconnection points to Jio with an aim to stifle competition. The sector regulator, in fact, has recommended that DoT penalise all three carriers, saying that violation of licence norms warranted revocation of their permits.

He was participating in an earnings call on Tuesday , a day after the Aditya Birla Group company reported an 88% year-on-year fall in net profit in the September quarter, hit by competitive pressures on the voice and data businesses. Kapania acknowledged Jio's big-bang entry last month, with free services sharply increasing the “multi-SIM usage environment,“ which, in turn, had partly triggered a sequential contraction in Idea's voice minutes and data realisations in the September quarter.

But he was quick to assert that Jio's impact on Idea's overall business had been negligible, as there were “very few portouts“ to the 4G entrant, especially as most users were using Jio as a second SIM. So much so, the Idea MD said there was no point in reacting to Jio, while “it's in the promotional phase“, asserting that “real competition“ would start only once Jio starts charging customers.