Jio denies Airtel's claim of providing enough interconnect points

Reliance Jio Infocomm on Tuesday again rejected Airtel's claim of adequate interconnect points, noting that 1.6 crore calls are still failing while connecting to the latter's network.

Besides its claim of providing enough interconnect points, Airtel also said that Reliance Jio has not been able to deploy its full capacity due to under-preparedness and insufficient testing effort, but Jio retorted that there is no call failure between Jio connections.

Tuesday's exchange comes even as the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India is scheduled to meet the incumbent operators on Friday over interconnection issue.

"Post our bilateral meeting on September 13 to premeditate on the matter of augmentation of PoIs, we had analysed the traffic figures at the interconnect links as well as your demands for projected capacity," Airtel said in a letter to Jio, dated September 26.

"Based on our due diligence of these dynamics, we had provided 1,350 E1s (interconnect points) on the very next day. This was followed by incremental capacity of 1,000 E1s provided on pan-India basis on September 20," it added.

Countering this, Reliance Jio on Tuesday said in a statement: "Reliance Jio Infocomm denies that there has been any delay at its end in operationalising the E1s. On the contrary, Reliance Jio has been consistently following-up with Airtel and the other incumbent operators over the last several months for augmentation of interconnection capacity."

"These requests had been denied by Airtel and the other incumbent operators as part of their anti-competitive strategy and in complete breach of their license conditions," it added.

"This has resulted in unprecedented call failures between Airtel and RJIL in complete disregard of the quality of service norms stipulated by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and has caused severe hardships to Indian customers. 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 further stated.

However, Airtel in its letter had said: "Unfortunately, despite the prompt and colossal effort put in by Airtel, as on date, only 2,484 E1s are live out of total capacity of 3,048 provided, primarily due to various reasons for delay attributable solely to Jio's under preparedness and insufficient testing teams/efforts."

Jio in the statement said it is 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 Reliance Jio's end even briefly. Transmission media of RJIL has been ready and operational for several months now," it said.

Jio further said Airtel's contention that the congestion in network has been caused by large-scale subscriber acquisition by Reliance Jio is "not only unreasonable but also anti-competitive".

--IANS

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