Roughly 8.5 crore out of about 30 crore call attempts by Jio’s users to the three operators failed on November 7 – the latest data available on the Mukesh Ambani-owned new telco’s website updated on Thursday. This compares with around 50-60% call failure rates earlier this month.
About 34% of the 13.81 crore call attempts made to Airtel from Jio failed, according to data. The failure rate on the Vodafone network stood at 26.7 percent out of 8.79 crore calls, while Idea network had the lowest call failure rate at 18.9 percent out of 7.48 crore calls.
The numbers are still way above the telecom regulator’s quality of service norms which mandate call failures at a maximum 0.5 per cent of all calls made, or 5 in a 1000 in a day.
“The situation has improved significantly and is going to get better over the new few weeks,” a Jio official told ET, sounding a conciliatory note after weeks of bitterness between the newcomer and India’s three largest operators.
Bharti Airtel has said that it had provided a total 17,000 points of interconnection (PoI), sufficient to support as much as 75 million Jio’s subscribers. It also asked Jio to ensure that the additional interconnection points be operationalised with the same promptness as they have been made available at a staggering pace by Bharti.
A spokesperson for India’s second largest telco Vodafone India, in a statement to ET, said that it has provided Jio with points of interconnection (PoI) capacity to cater to 50 million subscribers, as per the new entrant’s indicated requirements and parameters.
Idea Cellular didn’t respond to emailed queries from ET.
Interconnection enables mobile users to make calls to customers of other networks and is, therefore, crucial for smooth functioning of mobile services.
The PoIs have been a point of contention between Jio and the incumbent telcos, with the new entrant accusing the existing ones of not providing adequate PoIs to stymie its operations and acting in an anti-competitive manner. Jio’s rivals have maintained that they have released more than enough PoIs and well in time, and blamed shortfalls in Jio’s network due to which released PoIs aren’t being operationalized. Jio has denied these charges.
The dispute forced the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) to intervene. The regulator has since pulled up the incumbent telcos and recommended a Rs 3,050 crore cumulative penalty on Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular for denying interconnection capacity to Jio.
Trai, in its recommendation to the Department of Telecom, said it found the trio to be non-compliant with licence conditions and service quality norms, given the high rate of call failures and congestion at interconnect points for Jio.
The DoT is processing the recommendation and has sought legal opinion in the matter.
