Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Jio Industry Ltd (RJIL) has increased its ring time for outgoing calls to 25 seconds from 20 seconds. However, rivals Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea are demanding a minimum 30-second ring time.
Jio's increase in ring time comes after Airtel wrote a letter to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on September 3 stating that Jio’s move to reduce call ringing time to 20 seconds unilaterally has resulted in “huge inconvenience to customers on the Airtel network because many of these calls from RJIL (Reliance Jio) customers get disconnected even before they are picked up,” Economic Times reported.
“In the absence of any direction from Trai to Reliance Jio on the issue, we will also be constrained to reduce the A party release timer which is likely to trigger a race to the bottom and severely impact overall network performance,” Airtel added.
Airtel further explained that a shorter ring time will result in many missed calls, as a result of which the caller will call multiple times to the Jio network, thus enabling Jio to reduce its interconnect usage charges (IUC) payouts to incumbent telcos.
Earlier, Jio had dismissed the allegations and argued that 15 to 20 seconds is the globally followed norm. 20 seconds is more than enough for the person receiving the call to respond, Jio had said. A longer duration will only waste the spectrum resources, the company said.
On September 6, when the issue was discussed at a TRAI meeting, most of the telecom companies such as Airtel, Vodafone Idea, BSNL and MTNL, in the interest of customers, backed 30 seconds of minimum ring time.
Following the discussion, the telecom regulator put out a discussion paper, ‘Duration of alert for the called party’, and invited industry opinions on the maximum ring time. TRAI has also directed the telecom companies to zero-in on a ring time before the consultation process concludes.
What are interconnect usage charges (IUC)?
IUC refers to a fee paid by the telecom company from whose network the call is being made to the operators on whose network the call terminates.
The fee is paid because the originating operator collects tariffs from the consumer for the call that is being made while the operator on whose network the call terminates does not get anything even though its infrastructure is used for completing calls. IUC acts as a compensation fee to the terminating operator.