Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio has said that Vodafone and Idea Cellular are still not releasing sufficient interconnection points (PoIs), which it said is resulting in massive call failures. Jio has written letters to both these telcos earlier this week, warning them of consequences if they continue to ignore the 4G entrant’s requirement for more PoIs .
As per media reports Jio, in separate letters that were marked to the regulator Trai and telecom secretary, said that the average call failure rate on Vodafone's network over 63%, and the rate with Idea Cellular’s network is around 44%. The Mukesh Ambani-led has urged both telecom operators to adhere to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India’s (Trai) October 7 direction to comply with quality of services (QoS) rules set by the regulator. It said that the ongoing issue was impacting consumers’ interests.
“In many licensed service areas, the percentage of call attempts and PoI congestion during the peak hours with Reliance Jio Infocomm is still high….As you are aware, you never adhered to the schedule for providing E1s under one pretext or the other and this continues as at date,” Jio said.
Bharti Airtel has lately showed the most improvement with the provisioning of additional points of interconnection (PoIs). Daily call failures between Jio and Airtel’s networks is down to 56% of all calls from nearly 73% on September 23, an Economic Times reported had said earlier this week.
India's top incumbent carriers have been saying that they rre observing a ‘tsunami of asymmetric incoming voice traffic’ emerging from Jio’s network due to free services offered as a part of “Welcome Offer. Jio countered their claims by saying, “None of the pretexts raised by you have any standing based on facts or on law inasmuch as your obligation to provide the requisite E1s to meet QoS regulations are not contingent on any reasons or restrictions.”
Jio while urging telcos to urgently release adequate PoIs, said that the demand to support its 50 million subscribers by September 2016, is already past overdue with the incumbent service operators.
Earlier in June this year, the Mukesh Ambani-led telco had asked incumbents to provide support to interconnect an estimated 22 million of its customers by June this year, 50 million by September, 75 million by December and subsequently 100 million subscribers by March 2017.
Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular have recently claimed that more than adequate PoIs have been released. Trai had subsequently asked them to file a compliance report by October 17.
Last month, the telecom regulator has issued a show cause notice to top three telcos to explain why an action could not be taken against them for violating service quality guidelines. It had given incumbents a 10-day period, and is likely to take a call in coming week.
