Interconnect matter with Reliance Jio a non-issue, says Airtel's Gopal Vittal

NEW DELHI: Bharti Airtel feels points of interconnect (PoIs) between Reliance Jio and incumbent telcos is a non issue as the market leader has provided thousands to the new entrant within a few weeks, and is in the process of explaining its position to DoT and Trai.
Trai has recommended levying a steep Rs 1,050 crore penalty on Airtel, for not providing adequate points of interconnect, required to complete calls made from one network to the other.

Airtel India and South Asia CEO Gopal Vittal told ET that the company had provided interconnect points at a staggering pace, but in some cases there were issues of transmission from Jio’s end.

"In literally five weeks we've released thousands and thousands of PoIs, we've never done that in the past 20 years," Vittal said.

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"We believe it's a non-issue because it's an obligation for us to provide PoIs... We provided 2.5 times PoIs than any other player in the market," he added.

Airtel has given all data to Trai and is in the process of having discussions with the regulator and DoT.

The chief executive of the country’s largest telecom services provider said that Jio's entry with bundled plans would lead to a greater proportion of such plans being brought into the market, however, a large number of customers would still demand voice and data separately.

Having grown its revenue market share by 1.5 percentage points in the last fiscal year, Airtel will continue to focus on retaining high ARPU customers, while making efforts to convert feature phone users to smartphones.

Bharti is doing a pilot in Rajasthan to drive use cases of Internet on smartphones, which would in turn drive data penetration, a much needed recourse for telcos including Bharti, that have been struggling to add data customers.