Idea Cellular welcomes Jio's entry, keen to provide support

Idea Cellular on Monday welcomed entry of Reliance Jio in the telecom space and said it is committed to facilitate its seamless entry into the hyper-competitive market.

"Idea Cellular has in the past been providing and augmenting points of interconnect (POIs) very liberally and we will continue to support all new operators for all their reasonable, fair and legitimate requirements of PoIs," Idea Cellular said in a statement.

In August, there were a total of 2.97 million unique Jio subscribers who terminated calls on the Idea network.

"Our current allocation of PoIs would in normal circumstances cater to 4.65 million such subscribers indicating a buffer of 57 per cent in calling capacity. Idea has now decided to proactively, expand capacity with Jio to over 6.5 million subscribers, with the release of 196 additional PoIs, shortly. This additional capacity will provide for a buffer of 119 per cent against the August subscriber volumes," the statement added.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India on Friday met service providers -- Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular -- to discuss the issue of mobile network interconnection among various players.

Earlier Jio had said that interconnection points provided by other operators were not sufficient.

"Based on industry practice, 12,500 E1 ports (interconnect points, with technical parameters) are required for 22 million subscribers, which details have been provided to the Cellular Operators' Association of India member operators," said a Reliance Industries statement on August 18.

"As against this, the top 3 operators have released only 1,400 ports so far," the company said.

A rough calculation suggests Jio, as per the above, would need a little over 8,500 ports given a subscriber base of 15 million.

Reliance Jio had officially launched its services on September 5.

--IANS

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