Reliance Jio hits back at Airtel, Vodafone and Idea - says “all talk-no action”

There seems to be no truce in sight for the sparring telecom operators over the issue of point of interconnection (PoIs). Mukesh Ambani led Reliance Jio now says that there has been no augmentation in operational interconnect capacity in last 15 days from India’s top three telecom operators Airtel, Vodafone and Idea.

However, all three incumbent operators have said that they have increased the capacity to three times for Jio after the meeting with the telecom regulator. Jio differs and says its “all talk no action”. The company also says that the incumbent operators are trying to hamper Jio’s entry into the sector.

Reliance Jio and market leader Airtel were involved in a massive war of words over the issue of PoIs where Airtel said that Jio is creating a controversy over PoIs to mask inadequacies in its own service. According to Jio it requires 4,000-¬ 5,000 PoIs immediately from each operator but in the last 15 days, Airtel added one, Vodafone added five and Idea added only three PoIs. In the last 10 days, only Vodafone added two, the company said, alleging that incumbents did not demonstrate any real intent to resolve this issue. As of September 14, Airtel had operationalized 651 points of interconnect, while Vodafone had 467 and Idea Cellular had 526, Jio said in its statement, demanding more concrete action from the telcos. Reliance Jio says, "The deliberate move to not provide sufficient interconnection capacity, as is apparent from the above numbers, is clearly aimed at hindering RJIL's entry into the sector and is depriving Indian customers from enjoying superior HD voice services being offered by RJIL," the company said in a statement. Jio says it faces 10 crore call failures a day between Jio and incumbents. "The continued denial of requisite PoI's is in clear violation of the license conditions and Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) regulations on quality of service by the incumbent operators," it added in the statement.

Even before the launch of Reliance Jio services on September 5, incumbent telcos and Jio have been embroiled in a massive war of words, with Jio alleging inadequate points of interconnect (PoI) leading to failure of majority of calls made on its network. On the other hand Vodafone and Airtel said that it has since increased the interconnection capacity for Jio so that the telco can accommodate 15 million customers. And in the meantime, Telecom regulator TRAI has sought data on PoI from the telcos and will intervene in this matter for the second time.