Soon after Airtel announced its plan to offer three times more points of interconnect (PoI) to Reliance Jio Infocomm (RJio), the latter released the call failure rates on various networks via a statement to the media.
According to the statement, around 22 crore calls have failed on Airtel network. Around 52 crore calls have failed cumulatively on the networks of the three incumbent operators viz. Airtel, Vodafone India Ltd, and Idea Cellular Ltd. Overall, an estimated 75 calls failed out of every 100 call attempts, RJio pointed out.
The release welcomed Airtel’s decision to offer more PoI but reminded that the company has been communicating about the issue for last several months. “The inaction on the part of incumbents resulted in non-compliance of TRAI regulation on quality of service that mandates that PoI congestion should not affect more than 1 call in every 200 calls made,” said the release.
Points of interconnect enable two networks to connect with each other to facilitate calls.
“We have repeatedly appealed to the incumbent operators to create a fair and reciprocal framework of competition that is good for India and good for Indian customers,” RJio said in the statement.
The company also retaliated to Airtel’s claims on “asymmetric voice traffic” due to RJio in the release. “When a new operator begins its operations, its customer base is understandably low and a large proportion of these are new numbers that are not yet in the address book with whom they communicate. Therefore in the early days of operations of any new operator, there are more outgoing calls than incoming calls. Over time, as the customer base grows, this asymmetry reduces and the traffic becomes symmetric,” RJio elucidated.
According to the company, RJio’s outgoing traffic is only 2 calls per customer per hour and this does not demand a huge PoI. Also, it pointed out that the asymmetry of traffic has nothing to do with the PoIs required. “The equipment required for PoI are two-way trunks, which means that the same equipment is used for both directions. No additional equipment is needed for handling the calls coming from RJIL to the other operator. It is therefore in customer interest to have adequate interconnection capacity irrespective of the direction of traffic,” it said.
In its release, Airtel had raised a complaint about the asymmetric traffic flow between the networks of both the companies and requested Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to intervene in the matter.
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