Surprise! Reliance Jio woos Airtel, Vodafone, Idea on Valentine's Day

Reliance Jio was at it again! Wooing! Only this time it was not mobile users but rivals Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, and Idea Cellular, via a Valentine’s Day wish on microblogging site Twitter.

The tweet, “Dear @airtelindia, @VodafoneIN, @ideacellular, Happy Valentine’s Day. #WithLoveFromJio,” received more than 5,000 likes and was retweeted over 3,800 times.

Jio’s V-Day message for these companies came as a surprise not just to Twitter world but also to companies concerned.

Airtel response came a little late in the day: “Same feels @reliancejio! After all #HarEkFriendZarooriHotaHai.” Vodafone and Idea Cellular replied in a similar vein.

The V-Day tweet by Jio came as a change from the spat between the newcomer and others in the recent weeks.

Jio is in a row with three telecom operators for not providing it enough points of interconnect (PoIs). The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India has imposed a penalty of Rs 3,050 crore on Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, and Idea Cellular for not providing ample PoIs to Jio.

Till last week, the two companies were attacking each other over the issue of PoIs, with Airtel saying it had provided RJio with sufficient PoIs to serve as many as 190 million mobile customers in just five months, even as it had 72.5 million estimated users till now.

Jio countered Airtel’s statement on providing 35,000 points of interconnect to the company as “malicious” and “misleading”.

RJio also defended its own case by saying that there were no technical issues in its network as call failures on access network have reduced from 59.1 per cent to 0.6 per cent (as on January 31, 2017). The company said it happened after Airtel was compelled to provide PoIs after intervention by the authorities.