Idea cellular agrees to provide additional 230 per-cent inter-connection to Reliance Jio

Idea Cellular on Saturday said it has agreed to provide 230 per cent additional inter-connection capacity to help users of Reliance Jio complete calls, a move the Mukesh Ambani-led firm termed as “grossly inadequate” displaying lack of intent to resolve the critical issue.

Days after Jio accused dominant incumbent operators of providing inadequate points of inter-connections (PoIs), Idea on Saturday said it will “further enhance capacity in both access and long-distance inter-connection, by providing over 230 per cent additional capacity, allowing for two-way calling between the networks”.

Idea said it has now provisioned 1,865 ports for access, from the 565 earlier. Simultaneously, the NLD (national long distance) capacity is also being expanded by nearly 50 per cent.

“With this huge capacity expansion, over 2,100 ports will now be available for traffic between Idea and Jio, allowing sufficient buffer for future,” Idea said in a statement.

Terming the offer as “disappointing”, Reliance Jio said four crore calls fail every day between the Idea network and its own.

“Adequate inter-connection capacity so that call failure rate is less than 5 per 1,000 is a licence obligation of all telecom operators. As against this, over 750 calls per 1,000 are failing per day between Idea and Jio networks, which translates into 4 crore calls failing per day,” Reliance Jio said in a statement.

“Over 12 crore calls fail daily between Jio and the networks of Airtel, Vodafone and Idea. This is a breach of licence conditions by the incumbent operators and severely impacts customer interests. This is against zero call failures on the Jio network.”

It claimed that only 50 new inter-connections have been operationalised by Idea in the last 10 days as a result of which the call failure rate has been increasing drastically.

It countered the Idea statement saying “the proposed augmentation by Idea increases capacity by only 34 per cent, which is grossly inadequate”.

Reliance Jio said the proposed augmented capacity is less than 40 per cent of the initial demand placed by it. The company “fails to understand how the quality of service (QoS) parameters would be met with the proposed augmentation by Idea”.

“Furthermore, the manner of release of new capacity by Idea and the other incumbent operators is very disillusioning in so far as it is being reflected as a favour to Jio,” it said.

The company further said, “No favours are being made towards Jio by any of the operators” and it has been repeatedly raising the issue of insufficient PoIs as anti-competitive aimed at hindering the entry of a new operator and expects strict and urgent action on the matter.

Idea, on its part, is “committed to ensure superior quality of service for its customers, and will continue to engage and expand capacity for the new operator to allow seamless traffic flow between the networks”.