Reliance Jio Infocomm refuted Bharti Airtel’s claim that the current call drop situation was the result of underpreparedness by the new telecom operator, and alleged that it is the result of anti-competitive strategies by the incumbent operator.
“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,” it said today.
“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,” it added.
It’s been several weeks since Jio and the incumbents have been issuing statement after statement. While Jio says that its users are not able to get through to those on networks owned by Vodafone, Bharti Airtel and Idea Cellular, Airtel maintains that the fault lies with Jio.
To prove its point, Jio has even started putting up daily statistics about call failures to other networks.
The telecom regulator has asked all parties to produce data to support their contentions. It is likely that it may impose fines in case one or the other operators are found to be at fault. The TRAI is tasked with ensuring that customers do not face inconvenience because of various network issues, and has the right to impose penalties on those who — knowingly or unknowingly cause calls to be dropped.
RJIL said it 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’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,” it added.
Jio also said Airtel has itself said that inspite of the severe quality of service 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.”
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.