Jio Vs Incumbent Telcos Battle Takes A U-turn, Airtel, Idea Promise To Provide Sufficient POIs

Jio entered the market with a bang. It was not only gaining new subscribers at a rapid pace but its entry also upset the incumbent telecom players.

Earlier the leading telecom players including Airtel, Idea, and Vodafone were blocking calls from Jio network by providing insufficient Point of Interconnects (PoI), but now they are announcing their truce with Jio.

How Insufficient PoIs Affected Potential Jio Subscribers?

For obtaining a Jio SIM, the users have to submit an alternate mobile number for receiving an OTP. This OTP is required to generate the Jio offer code.

Due to the lack of PoIs offered by Airtel, Idea, and Vodafone to Jio network, Jio users not only faced “all lines to this route are busy” message while making calls to these networks, but also couldn’t receive OTP SMS on their existing number (Airtel, or Idea, or Vodafone) that was required to get a Jio SIM.

This made a lot of users angry who then took it to Reddit for expressing their anger against the leading Indian telecom operators. We can confirm this as we also tried to generate an OTP SMS by entering an Airtel number. We never got any Jio OTP SMS!

Idea & Airtel Promise Sufficient POIs For Jio Network

Among the 3 leading telcos, Idea is the first to release sufficient PoIs to Jio. Idea Cellular has now decided to release more POIs to Jio which would be more than enough to cater about 6.5 million Jio subscribers in future.

“Idea Cellular has in the past been providing and augmenting points of interconnect (POIs) very liberally and we will continue to support all new operators for all their reasonable, fair and legitimate requirements of PoIs,” said Idea Cellular.

Airtel has also decided to release more than 3x the number of required PoIs to Jio. These additional PoIs would be able to serve over 15 million Jio subscribers. While Airtel has requested TRAI to look into this matter, it is also committed to maintain the network quality for its existing subscribers.

“With the latest augmentation, the total number of PoIs will become three times the present number of PoIs. Based on the current traffic pattern with all other operators, this capacity is sufficient to serve over 15 million customers, which is significantly higher than Jio’s existing customer base,” said Airtel.

Jio is the first VoLTE network in the country and promises very fast data 4G speeds, but in reality the network doesn’t stay true to its hype. Many a times, many users complain of getting only 2-3 Mbps speed on Jio and sometimes even a 480p YouTube video needs to buffer before playing!

Unsurprisingly, Jio is losing its sheen soon after its commercial launch, and is missing its customer acquisition target by 50%. I am sure Jio has put its best minds to work it out, but as far as I know, Jio still needs a lot of work on its network quality and improve its coverage.

I was hoping that I would get Jio network at places where others had patchy coverage but Jio left me disappointed. How’s your experience with Jio so far? Are you facing network coverage and poor speed issues too?