NEW DELHI: Amid a high decibel feud over call ring duration, Bharti Airtel said it has been compelled to cut ring time on its network to 25 seconds to plug losses and match a similar move by rival Jio and rued that it was left with no choice in the absence of a firm directive by the regulator.
Telecom regulator TRAI had asked the warring operators to arrive at a mutually acceptable solution over the dispute until it concludes a formal consultation on the matter.
TRAI sources told PTI that the regulator is planning an open house discussion on the issue of 'duration of alert for the called party' on October 14, and the entire matter, for which a consultation paper has already been floated, will be decided soon.
Airtel has said that while its decision to cut call ring time, in response to a move by its Jio, may cause customer inconvenience, the company was left with no other choice in the absence of a firm directive from the regulator, despite repeated representations.
"While, we realise that this may cause inconvenience to customer, however, in absence of any direction from TRAI and to prevent further loss of Interconnect Usage Charges (IUC), we are not left with no other option than to reduce the timer in our network as well," Airtel said in a recent letter to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).
Airtel, in the letter dated September 28, informed TRAI secretary that the company has reduced the ringing timer to 25 seconds on its network "as well".
"Despite our repeated requests since last 7-8 weeks, TRAI has neither directed RJIL (Reliance Jio) to restore the timer to its original value nor issued any general direction to all operators to set the timer to 30 seconds as proposed by the majority of operators during the meetings," Airtel said.
The Sunil Mittal-led company contended that it repeatedly brought to TRAI's notice the consequences of Jio's move to reduce the ringer duration, including a higher incidence of missed calls in cases where the called party is not able to answer immediately.
It would also lead to increase in a number of call attempts to reach out to the called party, and the called party having to call back after they see missed calls, "thereby adversely impacting the consumers' experience as well as network Quality of Service."
Moreover, Airtel argued, the reduction in the ringing timer by Jio also deprives the called party the facility of call forwarding feature in case of 'no reply and voice mail', besides "gaming the IUC payouts by converting these outgoing calls to incoming calls, which is ultimately causing a huge loss of revenue to Airtel".
Late last month, as the contentious IUC issue came back on the regulator's radar, the industry -- polarised over the issue -- erupted into a war of words.
Airtel accused Reliance Jio of "gaming" the system of paying for calls to a rival network, and Jio has returned fire arguing that incumbents are charging high voice tariffs and manipulating the system to the detriment of their users.
Without naming Jio, a senior Airtel official recently alleged that "one large 4G-only operator" has arbitrarily slashed ringing time for outgoing calls to other networks.
This, Airtel had said, not only led to customer inconvenience (since the calls are cut-off midway before answering), but prompted a barrage of callbacks to artificially convert outgoing calls to incoming on its network.
Typically, a telecom operator pays for connecting calls of its subscribers to the company on whose network a call terminates.
Currently, an operator is required to pay 6 paise per minute as a mobile call termination charge, called IUC.
The IUC was originally proposed to be made nil from January 1, 2020. But TRAI is now reviewing the timeline.