Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Tuesday, Oct 05, 2004
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Tuesday, Oct 05, 2004 |
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Corporate Disputes Info-Tech - Telecommunications BSNL issues notice to Reliance on ILD traffic — `Pay up or face disconnection in 30 cities' Thomas K. Thomas
New Delhi , Oct. 4 BHARAT Sanchar Nigam Ltd has served disconnection notices to Reliance Infocomm in at least 30 cities - including Chennai, Mumbai and Pune - for routing international long distance (ILD) calls illegally. The State-owned company has asked Reliance to pay the access deficit charges on the illegal calls immediately or face disconnection. It has also raised questions over the decision taken by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to not to intervene in the dispute. BSNL officials said that Reliance was routing international long distance calls into the country and terminating on the State-owned company's fixed line network as if they were local calls. "The routing being undertaken by Reliance is in gross violation of the licence conditions. This is being done to escape payment of the access deficit charges to BSNL. This is just like the grey market operators and TRAI must ensure compliance of its own regulations," said a senior BSNL official. Access deficit charge is a type of a cess paid by all private telecom operators to BSNL for undertaking rural telephony. So, for every call that Reliance terminates on BSNL's network, the company pays a charge. The charge payable to BSNL is as high as Rs 4 per minute for ILD calls and around 40 paise for local calls. The public sector telecom major has alleged that Reliance was bringing ILD traffic into the country and then changing the caller line identification number of the caller to pass it on to BSNL's telephones as if the calls were originating from less than 50 kilometres. For instance, a call made from the US to a BSNL subscriber in Pune was being shown by Reliance as if the call originated from Pune itself by simply changing the number of the caller at the local exchange. Reliance officials offered no comments on the controversy and maintained that there was no disconnection by BSNL. BSNL officials said the stance taken by TRAI on the matter was favouring one company. "TRAI has been working on controlling grey market ILD traffic. They have also suggested bringing down the arbitrage for ILD calls in order to reduce the price differential between the legal and the grey market. So how can they refuse to intervene in this matter?" ask BSNL officials. The TRAI Chairman, Mr Pradip Baijal, has been quoted as saying that since the issue was relating to licensing, it was for the Department of Telecom (DoT) to intervene. The cities where BSNL has served disconnection notices to Reliance Infocomm include Jaipur, Dehradun, Shimla, Solan, Surat, Kota, Godhra, Bikaner, Udaipur and Bharuch. If BSNL carries out the threat, Reliance Infocomm's ILD network would collapse. BSNL has already pulled the plug off another ILD operator, Data Access, for non-payment of dues and for carrying illegal traffic.
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