Reliance Infocomm and Tata Teleservices Ltd, the two CDMA-based telecom service providers, are locked in what industry observers are calling a cold war over signing interconnect agreements.
The two companies have not yet signed interconnect agreements and have not set up points of interconnect in 12 of the circles they operate in, leaving over 5.5 million users of both the service providers in the lurch.
Tata Tele had begun launching its services in these circles in November 2004 and completed the rollout in January this year.
In the normal course, interconnect agreements should have been in place as soon as the licence was issued and much before the physical rollout of the services.
In these 12 circles, an Infocomm CDMA subscriber could not make or receive a call from a TTSL phone and vice-versa. A call made from either of the operator's phones failed to terminate at the other party's end, resulting in the death of the call, industry sources told Business Standard on Thursday.
Of the 23 circles spread across the country, Reliance Infocomm operates in 22 and Tata Tele in 20. The 12 circles are Bihar, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Punjab, Rajasthan, UP, UP (West), Kolkata and Bengal. Sources in both the companies confirmed that they had not signed the agreement and that negotiations had been on for some time.
They refused to give any reason for the delay in signing the agreement. The Tata group and Reliance had earlier locked horns over a bandwidth issue with the latter alleging that state-run VSNL was blocking bandwidth at the landing station end in Mumbai.
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