Reliance Welcomes Airtel Move To Improve Inter-Connectivity As Jio Call Failure Rate Hits 75%
Airtel agrees to treble the number of points of interconnect to Jio
After Idea, Bharti Airtel today also agreed to provide additional interconnect points to Reliance Jio, saying these ports will be sufficient to support 1.5 crore customers of the new operator.
“Airtel has been providing PoIs (points of interconnect) to Jio, well ahead of the commencement of its commercial operations. With the latest augmentation, the total number of PoIs will become 3 times the present number of PoIs”Airtel statement
Reliance Jio -- which commercially launched its services on September 5 -- has accused incumbent players of not releasing sufficient inter-connection ports and had sought legal action against them. Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani, on September 1, alleged that the Jio network had suffered 5 crore call failures in the preceding week due to inter-connectivity issues.
Airtel’s move comes a day after Idea Cellular offered to provide more points of interconnection (PoIs) to Jio after the the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) intervened to resolve the matter. Idea had yesterday said it has decided to proactively expand capacity with Jio to over 65 lakh subscribers, with the release of 196 additional POIs, shortly.
According to sources, the regulator has said that it will take action against telecom operators found responsible for poor quality of service. Airtel said it is a responsible organisation committed to complying with the regulations and the interconnect agreements in letter and spirit and will continue to be so.
“Based on the current traffic pattern (on Airtel’s network) with all other operators, this capacity is sufficient to serve over 1.5 crore customers, which is significantly higher than Jio’s existing customer base,” the statement said.
Like Idea, Bharti Airtel also highlighted the issue of “massive asymmetry” in the volume of traffic between the two networks. The company added that it would need to take cognizance of the situation and ensure that the quality of service for its own customers is not impacted.
Inter-connection is required to enable mobile users to make calls to customers of other telecom networks. A mobile operator levies inter-connection usage charge for each incoming call it gets from subscriber of another network. Incumbent telecom operators have been demanding higher interconnection charges compared to 14 paise they get for each incoming mobile call on their network.
Airtel, which is the country’s largest operator with 25.57 crore subscribers, has also extended an invitation to Jio for discussing its requirement of additional PoIs. Airtel expressed hope that TRAI will look into the issue of asymmetric traffic on an urgent basis and ensure that massive volumes of free calls terminating on Airtel’s network do not adversely impact its network.
Soon after PTI filed this story Reliance Jio Infocomm issued a press statement in which welcomed the Airtel move as Jio was experiencing a 75 percent call failure rate.
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.Reliance Jio Infocomm Media Statement
Reliance Jio also responded to the concern expressed by Airtel and Idea regarding asymmetric traffic. Its statement said the company’s voice traffic is “in line with industry trends”.
When a new operator begins its operations, its customer base is understandably low and a large proportion of these are new numbers that are not yet in the address book with whom they communicate. Therefore in the early days of operations of any new operator, there are more outgoing calls than incoming calls. Overtime, as the customer base grows, this asymmetry reduces and the traffic becomes symmetric. 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.Reliance Jio Infocomm Media Statement