1.6 CRORE CALLS STILL FAILING EVERY DAY BETWEEN AIRTEL AND JIO
Mumbai, 27th September 2016: Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (“RJIL”) refers to certain media articles appearing earlier today regarding Bharti Airtel Limited’s (“Airtel”) letter to RJIL on delay in operationalization of POIs provided by Airtel in the last few days. RJIL has subsequently received the correspondence from Airtel.
RJIL denies that there has been any delay at its end in operationalising the E1s. 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 as part of their anti-competitive strategy and in complete breach of their license conditions. This has resulted in unprecedented call failures between Airtel and RJIL in complete disregard of the Quality of Service norms stipulated by TRAI and has caused severe hardships to Indian customers. It may be noted that there are no call failures in Jio-to-Jio calls, while over 1.6 crore calls are still failing every day between Airtel and Jio.
RJIL has been completely ready to accept any augmentation of POIs from Airtel and other incumbent operators. As against allegation of under-preparedness and insufficient testing teams and efforts, reality is that work has not been held up at RJIL’s end even briefly. Transmission media of RJIL has been ready and operational for several months now.
Airtel has itself said that inspite of the severe QOS and congestion issues, it has provisioned capacity in 10 daysagainst their entitlement of 90 days. It may be noted that 10 days is too long given the current QOS parameters. Furthermore, there is no entitlement of timing when it comes to such severe breach of QOS as against the 90 days sought by Airtel.
Airtel’s contention that the congestion has been caused by large-scale subscriber acquisition by RJIL is not only unreasonable but also anti-competitive. There has been a fabulous response to RJIL’s commencement of operations, with millions of customers joining the network in the first few days itself. In anticipation of such demand for services, RJIL had given its projections for POI requirement to Airtel over 3 months ago. The massive deterioration in QOS parameters would not have occurred had Airtel augmented POIs on a timely basis.
With regard to the traffic asymmetry issue, the current traffic pattern is completely in line with what is expected in a new network. It would tend to move towards balanced traffic as the network matures and has sufficient scale.
About Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited:
Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (“Jio”), a subsidiary of Reliance Industries Limited (“RIL”), has built a world-class all-IP data strong future proof network with latest 4G LTE technology. It is the only network conceived and born as a Mobile Video Network from the ground up and supporting Voice over LTE technology. It is future ready and can be easily upgraded to support even more data, as technologies advance on to 5G, 6G and beyond.
Jio will bring transformational changes in the Indian digital services space to enable the vision of Digital India for 1.2 billion Indians and propel India into global leadership in digital economy. It has created an eco-system comprising network, devices, applications and content, service experience and affordable tariffs for everyone to live the Jio Digital Life. As part of its customer offers, Jio has revolutionised the Indian telecom landscape by making voice calls for Jio customers absolutely free, across India, to any network, and always. Jio makes India the highest quality, most affordable data market in the world so that every Indian can do Datagiri.
