Mumbai:Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited (“RJIL”) today in a statement said: RJio refers to certain media articles appearing earlier today regarding Bharti Airtel Limited’s (“Airtel”) letter to RJIL on delay in operationalization of POIs provided by Airtel in the last few days. RJIL has subsequently received the correspondence from Airtel.

The statement said: “RJIL denies that there has been any delay at its end in operationalising the E1s. On the contrary, RJIL 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. This has resulted in unprecedented call failures between Airtel and RJIL in complete disregard of the Quality of Service norms stipulated by TRAI 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.”

“RJIL has been 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 RJIL’s end even briefly. Transmission media of RJIL has been ready and operational for several months now.”

“Airtel has itself said that inspite of the severe QOS and congestion issues, it has provisioned capacity in 10 days against their entitlement of 90 days. It may be noted that 10 days is too long given the current QOS parameters. Furthermore, there is no entitlement of timing when it comes to such severe breach of QOS as against the 90 days sought by Airtel.”

“Airtel’s contention that the congestion has been caused by large-scale subscriber acquisition by RJIL is not only unreasonable but also anti-competitive. There has been a fabulous response to RJIL’s commencement of operations, with millions of customers joining the network in the first few days itself. In anticipation of such demand for services, RJIL had given its projections for POI requirement to Airtel over 3 months ago. The massive deterioration in QOS parameters would not have occurred had Airtel augmented POIs on a timely basis.”

“With regard to the traffic asymmetry issue, the current traffic pattern is completely in line with what is expected in a new network. It would tend to move towards balanced traffic as the network matures and has sufficient scale.”

DeshGujarat