Jio seeks action a for violating MNP rules against top Service providers

Reliance Jio Infocomm (RJIL) has urged the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) to levy financial disincentives on Bharti, Vodafone and Idea Cellular for rejecting all mobile number portability (MNP) requests made to port out to Jio. It has further sought a revocation of their telecom permits if they continue to do so.

Referring to "blatant disregard" to licence conditions by the three telcos in rejecting all MNP requests to port out to Jio, RJIL in a letter to the Trai chairman RS Sharma has said, "Trai must direct the dominant incumbent operators to comply with the licence terms and obligations ..., failing which it should recommend cancellation of the respective licences at the earliest".

MNP could be the next contentious issue between the two sides after the telecom regulator last week resolved the issue of points of interconnect.

Jio in its letter has explained that Bharti received a total of 83 requests, Vodafone 56 and Idea Cellular 62 requests for porting out to Jio out of which none have been completed so far. Jio has said that Bharti, Vodafone and Idea have cited "violation of contractual obligations" for not porting out 69, 35 and 57 of the total requests respectively. The remaining requests were rejected owing to technical reasons.

The company explains that according to the MNP regulations the clause of "contractual obligation" can only be used to reject a request in two cases. Firstly when a subscriber has not met with an exit clause in the case of certain specified contractual obligations of a post-paid connection bundled with a device. Secondly corporate connection with contractual obligation having an exit clause and the subscriber has not complied with the same.

Jio however has said that in the present case the grounds for rejection are invalid because there are no such contractual obligations.