Reliance Jio tells incumbent telcos to watch their tone. And now Idea faces Jio’s heat

Ever since Reliance Jio’s soft launch in December last year, the Mukesh Ambani owned telecom company has been fighting a never ending battle with the incumbent telecom players in the sector. One of the major grouse for Reliance Jio has been the issue of inadequate point of interconnection (PoI). All telecom operators need PoIs from one another in order to connect its users call from one network to the other. Reliance Jio in its latest statement says that 4 crore calls are failing every day between Jio and Idea, this after Idea released a statement a while back saying the company will be providing over 230% additional capacity, allowing for two way calling between the networks. But Jio says “The response by Idea to the severe Quality of Service issues faced between the Idea and Jio networks is disappointing and displays lack of intent on Idea’s part to resolve this critical issue”, the company said in a statement.


All operators are obligated as per license conditions to provide adequate interconnection capacity so that call failure rate is less than 5 calls per 1000 calls. It was not long ago when we saw a biggest slugfest in the telecom industry between Reliance Jio and Airtel over the issue of PoIs, Jio says over 12crore calls each fail on both Airtel and Vodafone network and now Jio says that 750 calls out of 1000 fail on Idea network. Idea says with its new capacity expansion to Jio “over 2,100 ports will now be available for traffic between Idea and Jio, allowing sufficient buffer for the future”. Jio differs from Idea, “even the proposed augmented capacity is less than 40% of the initial firm demand placed by RJIL based on transparent workings shared with Idea several months ago.” Jio said in the same statement.

Importantly, Jio also commented on the tone of the statements released by the incumbent telecom operators, “The manner of release of new capacity by Idea and the other incumbent operators is very disillusioning insofar as it is being reflected as a favour to Jio. No favours are being made towards Jio by any of the operators. All operators are obligated as per license conditions to provide interconnection such that Quality of Service parameters are met.” Jio said.