Will resolve all issues with Jio in a few weeks: Mittal

With telecom regulator Trai taking a stern view of the ongoing spat between incumbents and new entrant Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel chairman Sunil Bharti Mittalon Tuesday offered an olive branch, saying all issues will be resolved within a few weeks.

“It (points of interconnect, or PoIs) was non-existent (issue). Suddenly this has become unnecessarily a big issue. I have told my team and sent messages to Mukesh (Ambani) and his team: Let's ignore and resolve this.Every passing day and every passing week this will get resolved. I am not saying look out for six months or 1 year -look out for few weeks and this will get settled,“ he said in the first comments on the spat with Reliance Jio. Mittal said Jio is being provided sufficient network interconnection points since the time it started commercial service. “You have to keep in mind 5th September was their commercial launch. 2,000 PoIs have been provided and more are being provided. You can't judge this industry in 10 days time.The problem is in the media and in the letter exchanged and all that. Temperature is unnecessarily being taken up. I think you need to lower that down. There needs to be a dialogue. People need to sit together,“ he told ET Now.

“It (Jio's 4G service) was all-India launch at one go. It's a size and scale that is very big. It's also a fact that the launch was free voice and fo ur months of free data,“ Mittal said. He said that no one must have anticipated impact of their launch. “We have an asymmetric traffic of 10 times to 1. We have to manage our own networks. We have to ensure that quality of service of my customers is not going down,“ Mittal said.

(TOI)