Reliance Jio Calls Airtel’s PoI Claim “Misleading”, Over 53% Of Jio Calls Still Fail On Airtel Network
The fight between Reliance Jio and Airtel for the lack of PoI (Point of Interconnection) does not appear to be settling any soon. Bharti Airtel claimed of providing 35,000 PoIs to Jio, which is more than double of what it requires for its 72.5 million subscribers, but Jio claims otherwise.
“The PoIs (Points of Interconnect) have been provided well above the customer growth projection provided by Jio to Airtel. 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,” said Bharti Airtel in a statement.”
Jio calls this claim as “misleading” and has accused Airtel of slowing down the PoI implementation process.
Airtel’s Claims Vs. Jio’s Blames
Jio refuted Airtel’s claims of providing 35,000 PoI by saying that Airtel has not even done the port allocation for over 1,100 PoIs. This is the first step in PoI implementation and without this Jio cannot proceed any further. Airtel is also asking for demand notes for providing PoI for slowing down the process, whereas no payment in due under the Interconnection Agreement, claims Jio.
Jio reveals that Airtel is causing reputational damage to it by claiming that there are technical issues in the Jio network. Jio claims that Airtel needs to work on its media readiness and electrical interfaces.
Airtel is comparing Jio network with Vodafone and says that it provided about 40,600 PoIs to Vodafone, out of which 23,950 are for incoming calls, which is much less than what has been provided to Reliance Jio for incoming calls.
“Vodafone with 202 million customers has been provided a total of approximately 40,600 PoIs by Airtel over a period of 21 years. Of these 23,950 PoIs are for incoming calls – much less than what has been provided to Jio,” Airtel claimed.
Jio calls this an “arbitrary comparison” and says that no two telecom operators have the same traffic. Network operators must not try to control the traffic from their customers. RJIL is passing on the benefits of a much more efficient technology to its customers whereas Airtel, which did not invest in upgrading its technology, is now trying to prevent the customers from enjoying the free voice benefits offered by Reliance Jio.
“Airtel did not invest in new technologies and is now trying to prevent customers from enjoying benefits of superior service offered by a new operator, while misleading customers and causing reputational damage to RJIL by claiming that there are technical issues in RJIL network,” said RJIL in a press release.
Reliance Jio Reveals The Stats
To counter Airtel’s claims more effectively, Jio has revealed the call failures stats showing how the user experience is getting affected due to lack of PoIs.
It is evident from the data that outgoing call failure rate between Jio and Airtel within the same circle is down to just 0.6% as on 31 Jan 2017 as compared to 59.1% on 30 Sep 2016.
However, the failure rate is still 53.4% for NLD (National Long Distance) calls as on 31 Jan 2017. An interesting point to note here is that the NLD call failure rate was 29.4% on 30 September 2016.
According to TRAI norms, the call failure rate must not exceed 0.5% and the telecom operators are obliged to provide adequate PoIs to other operators under the license agreement.
Given these facts, we can conclude that the situation is improving albeit at a very slow rate. The intra-circle call failure rate should meet the norms shortly whereas the same cannot be said about the inter-circle call failure rate.
We do hope that Airtel and Reliance Jio resolve this PoI issue amicably and at the earliest, else they both risk losing the customer trust.
