A fresh war has begun between the incumbent operators, mainly, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular and the new entrant – Reliance Jio. last week, the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) attacked the Government for favoring Reliance Jio.
Within a couple of hours of the secretary of the department of telecommunications (DoT) JS Deepak announcing the Spectrum auction schedule, COAI issued a media statement accusing Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) of favoring Reliance Jio. It seems that the COAI was ready with the press release and was waiting for the right timing.
When the Government announced spectrum auction, COAI released press statement. Next day, it was prominently published by all the business Newspapers on front pages.
Any serious observer of Indian telecom sector would agree that the war had begun and it could only get dirtier from here. COAI is an industry lobby group that represents private incumbent operators including Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular and Vodafone.
Though COAI had been opposing TRAI on various platforms, it was for the first time that it directly accused the TRAI (and indirectly the Government) of favoring Reliance Jio. What was surprising was the timing of the strongly worded press release.
Within a couple of days, Reliance Jio retaliated and accused incumbent operators of deliberately delaying its launch by not giving points of Interconnections (POI)s) to it.
I will not go into content of the letters written by COAI and Reliance Jio as all the Newspapers have published it.
The last battle between the incumbent and the new operators was during the UPA regime when A Raja was the minister. The incumbent operators opposed the entry of new operators, when the licences were awarded in 2010. They attacked Raja and questioned allocation of Spectrum to the new service providers on the basis of first-come-first-served basis.
This resulted in one of the biggest scams in Indian history. In the process, the minister along with promoters of two new Telcos went to jail. The incumbent operators were also allocated additional spectrum on first-come-first-served basis. So, everyone was found to be involved in the ‘spectrum scam’. In fact, the scam was happening for last many years.
As a result, the process of allocation was streamlined and now all the operators had to acquire Spectrum through auction process. So, party was over for the incumbent operators.
In fact, the incumbent operators suffered more due to ‘scam’ than the new operators as they had a healthy balance sheet and a good story to tell the investors. Now, they have to acquire Spectrum through auction and this has adverse impact on their balance sheets.
It is in the interest of all the operators to co-operate with each other and remove any mistrust through dialogue.
(The writer is a Senior Journalist)