Point of Interconnect (PoI) is a heating issue among Indian telecom sector. Ever since Reliance Jio has started its operation in India, the telecom company is accusing incumbent operators for not releasing inter connect points.
Airtel has today said that it provided adequate number of E1s. However Airtel says that it is Reliance Jio is at fault, as they have not implemented the Point of Interconnect properly.
Reliance Jio has now said that around 1.6 Crore call failure still happen Jio and Airtel every day. While on the other hand there is no call failure between Jio to Jio calls.
The company in a release further says that:
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.
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 Reliance Jio 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.
