Vodafone, RCom may face Trai action over differential pricing

30 Aug 2016

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) may pull up two telecom players, Vodafone India and Reliance Communications, for violating differential pricing norms that were set earlier this year.

According Zee Business, the sector regulator may ban offers given by Vodafone India and Reliance where the customers of the service providers can avail of unlimited movies from Hungama.com.

Trai has observed that this is in violation of the differential pricing norms put in place earlier this year to avoid giving undue advantage to any single content provider through telecom service operators.

Zee Business said that Trai may ban the Hungama.com offers provided by Vodafone and Reliance Communications.

The violation may even attract a penalty of Rs50,000 per day for the telcos, up to a maximum of Rs50 lakh, as is stated in the rules presented earlier in the year. So far, a penalty hasn't been announced.

This may play out to be a huge setback to the two telecom players, as both Airtel and Reliance Jio, have their own content store, which doesn't restrict them from giving out such offers to its customers.