Still no common ground for the warring incumbent telcos and Reliance Jio

After Bharti Airtel and Idea, Vodafone India is the latest incumbent operator to agree to increase the points of interconnect (PoIs) with Reliance Jio Infocomm. Vodafone India said that the company is willing to increase the PoIs to Jio to three times of what it is providing at present. Vodafone said "Following guidance from TRAI and clarifications from Jio regarding its commercial launch, Vodafone India has decided to increase the Points of Interconnect (POIs) between the two operators by thrice and accordingly increase the capacity to connect," the company said in the statement.

While Reliance Jio welcomes Vodafone’s move for increasing the interconnection capacity it believes that the quantum of POIs proposed to be released by Vodafone is substantially less than the requirement. Jio said, “the situation has deteriorated significantly in the last few weeks, with over 80calls failing out of every 100 call attempts. In the last 10 days alone, over 15 crore RJIL calls have failed on the Vodafone network.”

Reliance Jio has been raising the issue of insufficient POIs even before its launch calling it anti-competitive and aimed at hindering the entry of a new operator. Jio said, “It is unfortunate that TRAI’s intervention was required for Vodafone to resume augmentation of POIs as admitted in its press release. Vodafone ought to have augmented POIs by itself in compliance with its license terms.” The company said in its statement.

The telecom regulator TRAI had to intervene on the issue of PoIs as it continued even after Reliance Jio services were commercially launched. TRAI called in on the four main telecom operators Airtel, Vodafone, Idea and Reliance Jio to once and for all sort out the issue of PoIs as it was impacting the consumers where they were facing call failures due to lack of points of interconnect required to complete calls originating from one network to another. Soon after the meet with the TRAI, Bharti Airtel agreed to increase PoI to Jio so that the company can service up to 15million customers and with Idea’s PoI bump Jio will be able to service 6 million subscribers.

Reliance Jio in its statement also talked about the issue of mobile number portability (MNP) another key issue it faces as a new operator. “RJIL hopes that Vodafone will enhance the PoI's sufficiently to meet their license obligation of QoS with immediate effect and maintain these parameters on an ongoing basis. Vodafone must also immediately make available MNP to all its subscribers opting to port to RJIL in accordance with the license terms and MNP regulations.”

Well it’s still unclear whether the telecom operators have finally found a common ground on the issue of PoIs. But importantly, it looks like Jio subscribers can finally hope to enjoy the free voice services from Reliance Jio (hopefully) without any call failures.