The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) on Monday unveiled the new rules for predatory pricing. They are planning to come up with this in the next 6 week, ET reported.
“We are coming up with a set of regulatory principles on tariff in a month to 1.5-month’s timeframe,” TRAI secretary Sudhir Gupta told ET, adding that the sector regulator was reviewing the Telecommunication Tariff Order (TTO) 1999 to bring clarity on pricing.
Ever since the launch of JIO in the telecom industry, the tariff has become the big issue.
TRAI has taken this step in order to bring in transparency in tariff assessments of telecom service providers after major telecom companies Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Idea and Reliance Jio blame each other of predatory pricing.
TRAI imposed a proposed penalty recently of Rs 3,050 crore on Airtel, Vodafone and Idea for not providing enough interconnection points to Reliance Jio.
According to the report by ET, earlier Jio asked TRAI to penalise market leader Bharti Airtel for violating tariff rules saying some of its plans priced at Rs 293 and Rs 449, were marketed in a manner that misled the customer. However, Jio mentioned in its letter to telecom that the latter must take strict action against operators offering personalized offers without publicly publishing the details to retain subscribers.
The regulator has asked stakeholders to put forth their views by April 21 and counter comments by May 1 to determine norms for predatory pricing.
The pricing of Reliance Jio and other telecom operators has done something which brought loss to Department of Telecommunication(DoT).