Despite making its way into consumers' hearts, Reliance Jio has failed to impress its rivals with everything it has to offer.
After a public spat with incumbent telcos over requisite points of interconnect (PoIs), Mukesh Ambani-led telecom operator bashed Airtel, Vodafone and Idea on Tuesday for resisting immediate release of operational PoIs in the last 15 days despite frequent reminders and bilateral meetings.
According to Jio, Airtel released only one operational E1, a digital transmission link, while Vodafone and Idea released five and three E1s, respectively, in the last 15 days. The total number of operational E1s released by the incumbent telcos is 1,644, of which 651 are from Airtel, 526 from Idea and 467 from Vodafone.
This number isn't remotely close to what RJIL reportedly seeks based on transparent industry practice. According to Jio, Jio's immediate requirement of operational interconnection capacity from each carrier is 4,000 to 5,000 E1s. As a result of this, more than 10 crore calls are failed per day between Jio and other telcos.
"The continued denial of requisite PoI's is in clear violation of the License conditions and TRAI regulations on quality of service by the incumbent operators," Jio said in a statement. "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."
Jio also acknowledged that the incumbent telcos have released statements and press releases showing intent to augment PoIs in the last few days, but none of it has been followed up with action. In addition to the PoIs issue, Jio stated the telcos continue to reject porting requests despite committing otherwise.
"RJIL hopes that the incumbent operators will enhance the PoI's sufficiently to meet their license obligation of QoS with immediate effect and maintain these parameters on an ongoing basis," Jio said.
Our internal sources revealed that Vodafone has informed Jio it cannot carry out porting requests to the new telco until 1 January, which is the date Jio will commercially launch its services. Airtel earlier responded to Jio's accusations saying RJIL was blaming other telcos for its technical shortcomings, which are causing call failures. But Airtel Chairman Sunil Mittal said the company would solve all PoI issues with Jio in the next few weeks.
