Reliance Jio Infocomm today said call drops between the mobile customers of Bharti Airtel and Jio reached 1.6 crore on daily basis due to lack of interconnection capacity provided by Airtel.
Reliance Jio also clarified that there are no call failures during voice calls between Jio customers on Jio network. The Mukesh Ambani company started offering free voice, data roaming services from 5 September, revolutionizing the Indian telecom market.
In a statement issued on Tuesday, Reliance Jio said it has been consistently following-up with Airtel and the other incumbent telecom operators over the last several months for enhancing interconnection capacity.
Jio said Bharti Airtel and other telecom network operators had denied these requests as part of their anti-competitive strategy and in complete breach of their license conditions. “This strategy has resulted in unprecedented call failures between Airtel and Reliance Jio. Airtel is not respecting the Quality of Service (QoS) norms stipulated by TRAI,” said Reliance Jio Infocomm in a statement issued on Tuesday.
Apparently, Bharti Airtel is the largest telecom operator based on mobile service revenue and phone users on its network.
Reliance Jio said it is ready to accept any augmentation of POIs from Airtel and other incumbent mobile operators. “As against allegation of under-preparedness and insufficient testing teams and efforts, reality is that work has not been held up at RJIL’s end even briefly. Transmission media of Reliance Jio has been ready and operational for several months now,” said Reliance Jio.
Airtel has provisioned capacity in 10 days against their entitlement of 90 days. Jio said 10 days is too long given the current QoS parameters. Jio said there is no entitlement of timing when it comes to such severe breach of QoS as against the 90 days sought by Airtel.
Bharti Airtel’s contention that the congestion has been caused by large-scale subscriber acquisition by Reliance Jio is unreasonable and anti-competitive. Reliance Jio has received response from millions of customers. In anticipation of such demand for services, Jio had given its projections for POI requirement to Airtel over 3 months ago. The massive deterioration in QoS parameters would not have occurred if Airtel augmented POIs on a timely basis.
With regard to the traffic asymmetry issue, the current traffic pattern is completely in line with what is expected in a new network. Jio said it would tend to move towards balanced traffic as the network matures and has sufficient scale.
editor@telecomlead.com
