India’s top three operators – Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular – contended the rules favoured new entrant Reliance Jio at their expense, allegations that Trai and Jio termed baseless. Earlier, the SMP parameters included volume of traffic, including data, and switching capacity, which have been dropped in the amended regulation.Trai added that predatory pricing will be determined on a carrier’s average variable cost and that telcos cannot offer pricing packages to individual subscribers to retain them without offering all customers the same tariff plan. Due to change in definition of predatory pricing and in SMP, incumbents said they were straitjacketed to respond to below cost tariffs from competition without flouting the new rules.Jio has 13-14% share of revenue and users, while Airtel and the Vodafone-Idea Cellular combine would each have over 30% revenue market share. Therefore, the new rules on predatory pricing favoured Reliance Jio Infocomm, Vodafone Group CEO Vittorio Colao said last week, adding that the order should be challenged in court. Vodafone’s India arm is close to completing its merger with Idea Cellular.It's not yet clear if Vodafone has filed a legal challenge as well.

Source: Economic Times March 05, 2018 01:30 UTC