Jio says incumbents not keeping interconnect promise

The new mobile company alleges that this has been happening despite repeated reminders and bilateral meetings with incumbent operators

Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio issued yet another statement against incumbent operators which said that despite repeated reminders and bilateral meetings with incumbent operators and claims made by them, hardly any new interconnection capacity has been made operational by any of the three incumbent operators -- Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular -- in the last 15 days.

Interestingly, in an interview with the Business Standard on Tuesday, Bharti Airtel’s chairman Sunil Mittal said that interconnect bandwidth would not be an issue and that Jio needed to operationalise the existing PoIs between the two.

Jio claimed that the incumbent operators had not demonstrated any real intent to resolve this issue, as its immediate requirement of operational interconnection capacity estimated based on transparent industry practice was 4,000–5,000 E1s per operator for the three incumbent operators. 

With over 10 crore call failures per day between Jio and the three incumbent operators, the newest entrant in the telecom sector claimed that quality of service had deteriorated for consumers.

The deliberate move to not provide sufficient interconnection capacity, as is apparent from the above numbers, is clearly aimed at hindering Jio’s entry into the sector and is depriving Indian customers from enjoying superior HD voice services, the company’s statement said.

There have been press releases and media statements by some of the incumbent operators about positive intent to augment interconnection capacity in the last few days, but this has not been followed with action.