Mumbai: Despite repeated reminders and bilateral meetings with incumbent operators and claims made by them, hardly any new interconnection capacity has been made operational by any of the three incumbent operators, viz. Bharti Airtel Limited (“Airtel”), Vodafone India Limited (“Vodafone”) or Idea Cellular Limited (“Idea”) for Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (“RJIL”) in the last 15 days, Reliance Jio said in a statement.

This is resulting into massive number of call failures.

“RJIL’s immediate requirement of operational interconnection capacity estimated based on transparent industry practice is of the order of 4,000 – 5,000 E1s per operator for the three incumbent operators and it is therefore apparent that at the current rate, the incumbent operators have not demonstrated any real intent to resolve this issue,” the statement said.

“With over 10 crore call failures per day between RJIL and the three incumbent operators, this has resulted in severe quality of service issues for the Indian customers. The call failure rate has been worsening rapidly in the last few days, while augmentation of interconnection capacity is still awaited.”

“The continued denial of requisite PoI’s is in clear violation of the License conditions and TRAI regulations on quality of service by the incumbent operators. The deliberate move to not provide sufficient interconnection capacity, as is apparent from the above numbers, is clearly aimed at hindering RJIL’s entry into the sector and is depriving Indian customers from enjoying superior HD voice services being offered by RJIL.”

“There have been press releases and media statements by some of the incumbent operators about positive intent to augment interconnection capacity in the last few days, however this has not been followed with action. Considering the current working E1s, including the proposed augmentation by the incumbent operators, would still be far lesser than what is required to meet QoS parameters, more concrete action is warranted from the incumbent operators.”

“Even on the other issue of Mobile Number Portability (“MNP”), while the incumbent operators have committed to allow porting for their subscribers who wish to subscribe to Jio services and which in any case is a mandatory requirement of their license and MNP Regulations, this has not translated into action on the ground. Most of the porting requests to the three operators are still getting rejected for unsubstantiated reasons,” the statement said adding that RJIL hopes that the incumbent operators will enhance the PoI’s sufficiently to meet their license obligation of QoS with immediate effect and maintain these parameters on an ongoing basis.

DeshGujarat