35,000 PoIs provided to Reliance Jio in 5 months: Airtel

The country's largest telecom services provider Bharti Airtel (Airtel) on Tuesday said it has provided a total of over 35,000 Points of Interconnect (PoIs) to Reliance Jio (RJio) in a record time of five months.

Of these 27,719 PoIs - 79 per cent of the total - have been dedicated for incoming calls from RJio customers, which is the highest amongst all operators, the company said.

"The PoIs have been provided well above the customer growth projection provided by RJio to Airtel. The capacity provided is ideal for serving over 190 million customers on the RJio network and is more than double the 72.5 million total customers currently claimed by RJio," Airtel said.

More importantly, the company said, the above mentioned capacity has been released at a staggering pace, and is much more than comparable capacity provided by Airtel to other operators.

For instance, Vodafone with 202 million customers has been provided around 40,600 PoIs by Airtel over a period of 21 years. Of these, 23,950 PoIs are for incoming calls – much less than what has been provided to RJio. And. Idea Cellular with 185 million customers has been provided around 38,130 PoIs by Airtel over a period of 21 years. Of these 23,694 PoIs are for incoming calls, again much less than what has been provided to RJio, the company said.

Also, Reliance Communications with 86 million customers has been provided around 13,400 PoIs by Airtel over 13 years. Of these 8,415 PoIs are for incoming calls – less than one-third that provided to RJio, it said.

Ever since the commercial launch of services by Jio in September 2016, Airtel has honoured its regulatory obligations and ensured that there are no capacity constraints from its end and customers are not inconvenienced. In fact, Airtel has been providing PoIs to RJio well ahead of the commencement of its commercial operations, Airtel said.

"It, therefore, appears that the constant rhetoric by RJio with regard to PoIs is aimed at covering up technical issues in their own network or their inability to activate the PoIs given," it said.

On the contrary, due to continued non-compliance of TRAI’s tariff orders by RJio by providing free services for the past five-six months, there is a tsunami of incoming voice traffic on the Airtel network, thereby, impacting the service experience of our customers.

"The huge asymmetry in traffic due to RJio’s free offers has also resulted in the complete failure of the present IUC regime, which assumes nearly symmetric traffic while fixing the below-cost termination charge. The present termination charge of 14 paise is less than half the actual cost of terminating calls on the network, resulting in huge loss to the company," Airtel added.

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