Jio, Airtel spar over interconnect issue on Business Standard

1. Jio, Airtel spar over interconnect issue Latest News- A fresh round of war of words broke out between Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel on Monday, with the former alleging that its service continues to face congestion issues with some of the large operators, including Airtel, not providing adequate points of interconnection (PoI) — a charge the incumbent operator refuted. Reliance Industries (RIL) in a statement said its telecom subsidiary Jio has garnered 72.4 million subscribers within four months of commencement of services but continues to face congestion issues as interconnect capacity provided by some large operators is "still way below requirement". "The POI capacity provided by these operators is still way below requirement and is falling short of the customer addition pace of Jio, resulting in quality of service issues for Indian customers. The resultant call failure rates continue to be of the order of 175 calls failing out of every 1,000 calls from Jio to Airtel network when the QoS regulations mandate that no more than five calls out of every 1,000 calls can fail. Indian customers are still being denied the benefits of superior voice technology on Jio's state-of-the-art network," said the company in a post-result statement. Replying to the allegation Airtel said, “About 60 million customers ofRelaince Jio are making calls into the Airtel network. To meet this requirement, we have provided 21,557 PoIs to them which is much higher than their demand of 14,164 E1s for catering to 100 million customers. Approximately 17,000 PoIs of the total POIs provided are dedicated to the outgoing traffic of Jio. Jio has yet to activate all the E1s we have provided to them."

2. While, their free traffic has been a cause of tsunami of asymmetric traffic towards Airtel’s network, Jio itself has been slow in activating the PoIs provided to them for the reasons best known to them. We understand that media is not available at their end. We hope that they will take immediate corrective actions, instead of blaming Airtel for issues being faced at their end,” the statement added. On January 10, Bharti Airtel filed an additional affidavit in the Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT) alleging the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) is killing competition in the sector just for the sake of one operator. Earlier on December 23, the telecom major had moved TDSAT against Trai for not acting against Jio for alleged violation of its regulatory orders that restrain operators from offering free voice calls and providing its promotional plan beyond an initial 90-day period. RIL on Monday also announced an additional investment to enhance network coverage and capacity of Jio through an equity issue. The company will make a rights issue of 6 billion optionally convertible preference shares aggregating Rs 30,000 crore. The company said that Jio has become the fastest growing technology company in the world, crossing 50 million subscribers in just 83 days after its launch. The RIL statement also highlighted that Jio was “a customer-obsessed organisation” and that it had ramped up the scale of its customer-oriented initiatives such as eKYC platform (over 300,000 outlets), home delivery services (across 600 cities), digital recharge and billing experience. It also said speed test results available on TRAI MySpeed portal puts the average download speed on the Jio network at 18.17 Mbps in December 2016 which was twice that of any other operator. RIL said it had built a future ready network which could easily deploy 5G and beyond technology in the last leg. Article Source – Business Standard