Airtel has Freed 17,000 PoI To RJio ahead of Time

Bharti Airtel disclosed that it has so far provided more than 17,000 points of interconnection (PoI), enough to serve 75 million customers, to Reliance Jio, ahead of the timeframe, but the newcomer contested the claims and blamed the market leader of violating licence norms by providing only one-way ports.

 

Airtel opined…

Reliance Jio, taking the total number of PoIs provided till date to over 17,000. This capacity is enough to serve over 75 million customers, on the basis of the forecast provided by Jio to Airtel.

The measure from Airtel comes within few days of the telecom regulator TRAI suggesting a Rs 1,050 crore penalty on it for purportedly refusing network connectivity to the new operator Reliance Jio.

This is well ahead of the timeframe, as there are at present only 25 million customers making calls to the Airtel network from Jio. Their regulatory obligations permit them to provide interconnect in a period of 90 days.

 

Jio’s accusation..

Reliance Jio slammed Bharti Airtel for giving only one-way points of interconnect for completing calls instead of both-way nodes in violation of licence agreement. It hoped the situation will improve now that Airtel has agreed to offer additional points of interconnect.

Nonetheless, Airtel has continued to violate the Interconnection Agreement by offering one-way E1s versus both-way E1s as provided for in the Agreement, which would have resulted in much more efficient utilization of interconnection resources.

Airtel asked TRAI to check the “incredible asymmetry” of calls terminating on the Airtel network from Jio because of the latter’s free services. This continued asymmetry will deteriorate the customer experience for Airtel customers over time and meltdown networks.

Jio said that Airtel has given interconnection points consequent to the meetings of the minister of communication (Manoj Sinha) and the TRAI chairman (R S Sharma) with the CEOs of Airtel, Vodafone, Idea and RJIL previously this week on the subject of breach of quality of service (QoS) parameters.

Over 280 crore calls have failed between RJIL and Airtel over the last three and a half months owing to the absolute shortage of POI (points of interconnection) capacity.

RJio has been consistently following-up with Airtel and the other incumbent operators for the last several months for augmentation of interconnection capacity. These requests had not been taken into consideration by Airtel and the other incumbent operators in complete breach of their license conditions. It may be noted that there are no failures in on-net calls, while over 4.6 crore calls are still failing every day between Jio and Airtel.

Jio believes that the current traffic pattern between the Jio-Airtel network is in line with expectation from a new network and with time it will tend to move towards balanced traffic as the network matures.

Source  :   https://www.dynamiclevels.com/en/blog/airtel-has-freed-17000-poi-to-rjio-ahead-of-time