Tech Telecom

Bharti Airtel said that it has provided over 7,000 additional Interconnection Points to Reliance Jio taking the total number of PoIs provided till date to over 17,000. However, Jio said over 4.6 crore calls between its network and Airtel fail due to inadequate points of interconnect provided by Airtel.

“This capacity is sufficient to serve over 75 million customers, based on the forecast provided by Jio to Airtel. This will also ensure that the quality of service (QoS) is maintained and the customers are not inconvenienced,” an Airtel statement said here.

“As a matter of fact the number of PoIs provided by Airtel to Jio is more than 2.5 times the number provided to an existing operator with a comparable subscriber base,” it added.

Previously the telecom regulator heavy penalties to Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular – for not providing sufficient PoIs to Reliance Jio.

“With the latest augmentation, Airtel has now provided Jio with the capacity to cater to 75 million customers. This is well ahead of the timeframe since there are currently only 25 million customers making calls to the Airtel network from Jio,” the Airtel statement said.

“There are no network related issues that Reliance Jio has faced beyond the acute shortage of POIs provided by Airtel and other incumbent operators. It may be noted that there are no failures in on-net calls, while over 4.6 crore calls are still failing every day between Jio and Airtel,” Jio said.

However, Airtel has offered one-way E1s as against two-way E1s, Jio said. Providing two-way E1s would have improved the situation greatly. Airtel is obliged to offer PoIs irrespective of the traffic pattern or the status of operations of other operators as per the license agreement, Jio added.