Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (RJIL) can now heave a sigh of relief Bharti Airtel agrees to offer more points of interconnection to it. Further Jio has signed an intra-circle Roaming pact with BSNL. Thus now BSNL customers can now be able to use Jio’s network while roaming and vice versa.
Bharti Airtel in a press release said that it will increase the number of interconnect points so that the total number would “become three times the current level” and it would be sufficient to serve over 15 million customers which is significantly higher than Jio’s existing customer base.
Meanwhile, Reliance Jio issued a press release welcoming Airtel’s offer but made a veiled attack on incumbent operators.
“RJIL has been writing regularly to Airtel and other incumbent operators regarding its requirement for interconnection capacity over the last few months. However, no action was taken for the last several weeks, resulting in non-compliance of TRAI regulation on quality of service which mandates that POI congestion should not affect more than 1 call in every 200 calls made,” Jio claimed in a press release.
“The situation has deteriorated significantly in the last few weeks, with over 75 calls failing out of every 100 call attempts. In last 10 days alone, over 22 crore calls have failed on the Airtel network, while 52 crore calls have failed cumulatively on the networks of the three incumbent operators viz. Airtel, Vodafone India Ltd and Idea Cellular Ltd,” Jio further alleged.
On alleged asymmetric voice traffic raised by Airtel, RJIL said, “RJIL’s outgoing traffic is less than 2 calls per customer per hour even during peak traffic period, which requires only a reasonable number of POIs. These calls are not to one operator but distributed over all the operators. Incumbent operators are describing such a modest call rate as a Tsunami of traffic from RJIL.”
“Moreover, asymmetry of traffic has absolutely nothing to do with the number of POIs required, which is based on the total traffic in both directions and not just in one direction. The equipment required for POI are two-way trunks, which means that the same equipment is used for both directions. No additional equipment is needed for handling the calls coming from RJIL to the other operator. It is therefore in customer interest to have adequate interconnection capacity irrespective of direction of traffic,” the Jio press release further added.
RJIL also added that “Airtel as well as other incumbent operators will enhance the PoI’s sufficient to meet their license obligation of QoS with immediate effect and maintain these parameters on an ongoing basis”.