The Draft Telecommunication Interconnection (Amendment) Regulation, 2018 proposes that an operator can ask another operator for additional ports, in case the projected utilisation of the capacity is likely to exceed 85 per cent over 60 day period.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), which came out with the draft on Tuesday, has opined that “Keeping in view the concerns of the service providers and to ensure efficient utilisation of the available resources, the amendment from 70 per cent to 85 per cent and 60 per cent to 75 per cent is proposed. The change in time period from 30 days to 60 days will provide a reasonable window for analysis and provisioning of additional ports.”

TRAI has sought views and comments from the industry by May 18 on the draft.

“Considering the technical and practical challenges raised by the stakeholders, the time-frame proposed for provisioning of ports for initial interconnection (PoI) and augmentation thereafter may be increased to maximum 42 working days,” it said, adding that this period may get further reduced to less than 30 working days if the seeker takes actions on its own end promptly.

It said each service provider has to provide its forecast of busy hour outgoing traffic for each PoI, at the interval of every six months, to the interconnecting service provider and the first such forecast will be provided within 60 days of the commencement of Regulations and thereafter on the April 1 and October 1 every year.

The issue of inter-connectivity got triggered post the launch of Reliance Jio in September 2016 when the company accused incumbent operators like Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular of not providing it sufficient PoIs leading to call failures.

However, other players blamed RJio saying the free calls offered by the company were the main reason for bad network traffic.

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