Vodafone Idea knocks on TDSAT's door against Trai's order blocking its RedX premium plan

KOLKATA: Vodafone Idea moved the telecom tribunal on Monday, challenging a regulatory order blocking its RedX premium tariff plan that offers faster data speeds and priority services to customers.
Rival Bharti Airtel, whose Platinum offer was also blocked, though told the regulator it would comply with the directive and not enrol new customers for the plan until the authority has examined it thoroughly.

The joint venture between the UK’s Vodafone Group and India’s Aditya Birla Group is said to be peeved with the “hasty” manner in which the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India blocked its eight-month old premium tariff plan over the weekend, without seeking its response on a matter that could inconvenience RedX customers, a senior company official said.

“We can confirm VIL has moved the Telecom Disputes Settlement & Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT) against Trai’s July 11 order, blocking our RedX plan,” the senior company official told ET.

VIL has already onboarded a significant number of subscribers for the plan introduced in November and has a lot to lose.

“VIL perhaps had little choice but to move TDSAT as it ran the risk of being forced to suddenly stop its premium services to many RedX customers and, in turn, losing them to Reliance Jio and Airtel,” Rajiv Sharma, research head at SBICap Securities, told ET.

In near-identical letters dated July 11, Trai asked VIL and Airtel to “withhold, with immediate effect and until further orders” their RedX and Platimum plans, respectively, to facilitate a detailed examination of both schemes. The regulator wants to determine if the plans would result in a deterioration in the quality of services for customers who are not on these plans. Trai asked both operators to protect the interests of users already enrolled for these premium offers.

Airtel had announced its plan only last week and had not started actual customer activations in a big way.

“We have initiated necessary steps, on an immediate basis, to withhold the present (Platinum) offering for any further new acquisitions, and the same would be fully implemented across all our channels and media communications within the next 72 hours, latest by Wednesday (July 15), this being the time it would take to implement this fully,” Airtel’s chief regulatory officer Rahul Vatts wrote in a letter dated July 12 to Trai. ET has seen a copy of the letter.

Experts said the big challenge for VIL in complying with Trai’s order is to ensure mandatory tariff protection to RedX customers, which is available for 180 days from the day of onboarding under present rules. Since many RedX customers have been enrolled for more than three months, VIL, they said, would have been compelled to suddenly stop premium services, causing inconvenience to many such consumers,

The struggling telco has already lost almost 20 million customers in the two quarters ended March, and analysts estimate it may have lost another 15 million users in the quarter ended June.