Bharti Airtel on Tuesday said that it had provided a total of over 35,000 Points of Interconnect (PoIs) to Reliance Jio in “record time of just five months.” It claimed that 79% of the total PoIs or 27, 719 PoIs - have been dedicated to incoming calls from Jio customers, which is the highest amongst all operators.
The telco said that the capacity provided is ideal for serving over 190 million customers on the Jio network and is more than double of the 72.5 million total customers currently claimed by Jio. “The PoIs have been provided well above the customer growth projection provided by Jio to Airtel,” it added.
Airtel said that it had provided Vodafone--202 million customers—with around 40,600 PoIs over a period of 21 years. Of these 23, 950 PoIs are for incoming calls – much less than what has been provided to Jio. Similar, the leading telco has provided Idea--185 million customers—with around 38,130 PoIs over a period of 21 years. Of these 23, 694 PoIs are for incoming calls – again much less than what has been provided to Jio.
Airtel added it provided around 13,400 PoIs to Reliance Communications over 13 years. Of these 8415 PoIs are for incoming calls – less than one-third of what has been provided to Jio. Similarly, Telenor with 58 million customers has been provided a total of approx. 9000 POIs over seven years.
The Sunil Mittal-led telco also reiterated that call drop problem faced by Reliance Jio was due to the technical glitches on the latter’s network and not due to lack of sufficient PoIs provided by Airtel.
Airtel, in a statement, said, “It, therefore, appears that the constant rhetoric by Jio about PoIs is aimed at covering up technical issues in their own network or their inability to activate the PoIs given.
“Ever since the commercial launch of services by Jio in September 2016, Airtel has honored its regulatory obligations and ensured that there are no capacity constraints from its end and customers are not inconvenienced. In fact, Airtel has been providing PoIs to Jio, well ahead of the commencement of its commercial operations. It, therefore, appears that the constant rhetoric by Jio about PoIs is aimed at covering up technical issues in their own network or their inability to activate the PoIs given,” Airtel said.
Airtel added that due to continued non-compliance with TRAI’s tariff orders by Jio by providing free services for the past 5-6 months, there is a tsunami of incoming voice traffic on the Airtel network, thereby, impacting the service experience of our customers.
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The huge asymmetry in traffic due to Jio’s free offers has also resulted from a complete failure of the present IUC regime, which assumes nearly symmetric traffic while fixing the below cost termination charge, Airtel further added.
“The present termination charge of 14 paise is less than half of the actual cost of terminating calls on the network, resulting in huge loss to the company,” Airtel said.
