The battle between incumbent telecom operators and Reliance Jio has intensified with the former terming as illegal the latter’s offering of services on a trial basis.

The operators alleged that Reliance Jio was offering full-fledged services under the garb of testing, thus violating rules governing interconnection, pricing and competition. In a communication to the Department of Telecom, they also said that traffic from users of Reliance Jio’s free trial offer was not only clogging their network but also violating regulations relating to pricing and competition.

“This is no test. This is the provisioning of full-blown and full-fledged services, masquerading as test, which bypass regulations and can potentially game policy features like the interconnection regime, non-predatory pricing and fair competition,” the Cellular Operators’ Association of India said in a letter to the Department of Telecommunications.

The industry body said that with 1.5 million users already on Reliance Jio’s network, it can no longer be allowed to offer services under the garb ‘testing’ as full blown services are being offered across the country. “They (RJio) should be asked to immediately disconnect all such connections provided to general public under the guise of test connections,” the COAI said in a letter to DoT.

Reliance Jio is yet to launch its services commercially but a few months back announced a soft launch wherein it gave out connections bundled with LYF smartphones to the employees of Reliance Industries. In the second stage of the trial, Jio allowed the employees to invite ten users.

“The volume of voice traffic being generated from such test users, due to the free offers , are choking points of interconnection, and impairing the quality of service of other operators,” the industry body representing Airtel, Vodafone and Idea said.

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