Reliance Jio call connectivity to Airtel improving? 7,000 POIs released to reduce call failures

Reliance Jio's poor call connectivity to other networks is not a new revelation, but the new telco is doing everything to make it right, at least that's what it says. Airtel has allocated additional 7,007 interconnect points to Jio, which will be operationalised in the coming days, in an effort to reduce the number of call failures between the two networks.

While the total number of points of interconnect (POIs) given by Airtel reaches 17,000, which according to the largest carrier is sufficient to serve 75 million users, Jio has slammed the telecom industry leader of violating license norms by providing only one-way ports.

According to Jio, 4.6 crore calls are still failing every day between Airtel and Jio and more than 280 crore calls have failed over the last three-and-a-half months. All this is due to the shortage of POI capacity.

"RJIL would like to reiterate that there has been no delay in operationalising POIs at its end," Jio said in a statement on Thursday. "On the contrary, RJIL has been consistently following-up with Airtel and the other incumbent operators over the last several months for augmentation of interconnection capacity. These requests had been denied by Airtel and the other incumbent operators in complete breach of their license conditions."

"Airtel has continued to violate the Interconnection Agreement by offering one-way E1s as against both-way E1s as provided for in the Agreement, which would have resulted in much more efficient utilisation of interconnection resources," the company added.

On the contrary, Airtel argues that it has given 2.5 times more than the number of POIs provided to an existing operator with a comparable user base. The largest telco in India also said that it has been providing POIs to Jio even before the commercial launch of the service.

TRAI favored Jio on the quality of service claim and imposed heavy fines on the three telecom operators, Airtel, Vodafone and Idea, for not providing sufficient POIs to Jio. Airtel has asked the telecom regulator to examine the asymmetry of calls that have the potential to degrade consumer experience and also result in network meltdowns due to Jio's free offerings.

The carrier wars between the biggest players and Jio is taking new turns every day. It remains to be seen how it turns out for the end-users. Airtel recently said that it has new strategies in place to compete with Jio and that doesn't include offering free services.