The de-monetisation of Rs 500 and Rs 1000 currency notes may have caused inconvenience to a number of people, but there is something to cheer about for Reliance Jio users. According to the latest update by the Mukesh Ambani-led telecom operator on Thursday, the call drop rate between Jio and India's largest telcos has reduced to 28 percent.
According to Jio's latest data, about 8.5 crore calls out of nearly 30 crore calls by Jio to other operators failed on November 7. While the number has reduced drastically, it is still far from TRAI's prescribed target of less than 0.5 percent.
Earlier this month, the call failure rates were around 50-60 percent. Individually, Airtel recorded the highest number of call failures followed by Vodafone and then Idea. According to Jio, 34.3 percent of the 13.81 crore call attempts made from Jio to Airtel failed. Vodafone and Idea stood at 26.7 percent out of 8.79 crore calls and 18.9 percent out of 7.48 crore calls, respectively.
The high call failure rate between Jio and Airtel, despite the latter being the one with the highest number of interconnect points for Jio, is due to the high volume of calls made between the two networks.
Airtel has provided a total of 17,000 points of interconnect (POIs) to Jio, which according to the company is sufficient to support as much as 75 million users on Jio's network. Vodafone has reportedly provided Jio with PoIs that can support as many as 50 million subscribers, ET reported.
A Jio official acknowledged the improvement in the network and assured that it would be better in the weeks to come. "The situation has improved significantly and is going to get better over the new few weeks," a Jio official told ET.
The call connectivity issues follow complaints from users about the slowing 4G speeds in India. Jio's services will be commercially launched on January 1, 2017, until then users are being offered all services, including calls, data and SMS for free. It remains to be seen how Jio will tackle the persisting issues before its time to go commercial.
