Airtels says Jio’s allegations ‘baseless’, condemns tower damage

New Delhi, Jan 2 : Telecom major Bharti Airtel has said that Reliance Jio’s allegations claiming sabotage of the latter’s tower infrastructure by its rivals are baseless and outrageous.
In a letter to the Anshu Prakash, Secretary of Department of Telecommunications, Airtel also condemned the disruption of telecom networks and the instances of vandalism.
“We have always advocated firm government action to ensure 100 per cent continuity of networks. We would in fact go so far as to say that the department must bring forward a policy to mandate ICR in such situations of vandalism and network outages as a matter of course so that customers are never inconvenienced,” it said.
“The baseless allegation made by Jio that Airtel is behind the farmer agitation to ‘sabotage’ their network and to force customers to switch to Airtel is therefore simply outrageous,” the letter added.
It also said that Jio’s annexure to the complaint did not demonstrate any evidence that Airtel has hand in the ongoing issues faced by Jio.
“The irony of the situation is that while the operating teams were having several conversations over the last few days on how to provide support to the Jio teams based on their request, Jio was actually spending time drafting frivolous letters and making scurrilous allegations,” the letter said.