Operationalise interconnect capacity: Airtel tells Jio

Airtel has in its letter detailed the number of PoIs allocated to Jio and how many have been operationalised

A day after the telecom regulator spoke on the quality of service faced by consumers due to the raging battle between incumbent telecom operators and Reliance Jio, a letter from Airtel made it clear that it had augmented the interconnect capacity but there has been delay at Jio’s end in operationalising it.

Jio, however, denied that there has been any delay. The Mukesh Ambani firm said on the contrary, it has been consistently following up with Airtel and the other incumbent operators over the last several months for augmentation of interconnection capacity but these requests had been denied by Airtel and the other incumbent operators as part of their anti-competitive strategy.

“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,” Jio added.

After a meeting on September 13, Airtel’s letter to Jio said, 1,350 E1s were provided the very next day. This was followed by another 1,000 pan-India E1s being released the next day.

Airtel has in its letter detailed the number of interconnect points allocated to Jio and of which how many have been operationalised. Airtel’s letter suggests that Jio has not operationalised the existing interconnect capacity allotted to it

The letter written by the regulatory head of Airtel, Ravi Gandhi, to Reliance Jio’s Kapoor Singh Guliani says, “Unfortunately, despite the prompt and colossal effort put in by Airtel, as on date, only 2484 E1s are live out of total capacity of 3,048 provided, primarily due to various reasons for delay attributable solely to RJio’s underpreparedness and insufficient testing teams/efforts. Even these capacities could be augmented with great persuasion by Airtel teams.”

However, Jio said it had 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 Jio’s  end even briefly,” the Ambani firm said.

Airtel has highlighted that Jio’s circles had cited issues with reference to acceptance testing and transmission media-related concerns and hence the augmentation process could not be completed.  These issues are still a challenge in many of Jio’s circles the letter states.

Airtel has specified transmission media-related issues in West Bengal and Kolkata and said these have been resolved in some other circles in the last four days.

Jio said Airtel’s contention that the congestion has been caused by large-scale subscriber acquisition by it is not only unreasonable but also anti-competitive.

Airtel’s letter states that in the interest of consumers, interconnect bandwidth was provided in 10 days even though the turnaround time is 90 days as mandated by the regulator and agreed upon in the interconnect agreement.

The issue has arisen due to Jio taking on board many consumers ahead of its commercial launch. Despite this, the allocation of fresh points of interconnect has lowered utilisation to 75 per cent and as more PoIs are opened up utilisation levels will come down.

However, Jio said it has got a fabulous response from customers and in anticipation of such demand for services, it 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,” Jio added.

Airtel has also raised the issue of traffic asymmetry as 89 per cent traffic originating from Jio is terminating on its network. Airtel argued that the traffic asymmetry was causing a huge financial loss to the company.