Update (Sept 15th): Vodafone will also be increasing its POIs with Jio by three times.
At RIL's AGM on September 1st, CMD Mukesh Ambani announced the commercial launch of Jio's 4G services. Along with revealing the tariffs and enticing plans in the form of the welcome offer and student offer, he also urged the incumbent operators to ensure healthy competition by playing fair.
With its aggressive marketing and promotional offers, Reliance Jio is adding subscribers to its network at an unprecedented pace.
Thanks to voice calls being free, other operators are facing huge call volumes by Jio subscribers, resulting in call drops. In the past few weeks, about 75 calls were failing out of every 100. In fact, according to the company, in the past 10 days alone, over 52 crore calls were failed cumulatively on the networks of Airtel, Vodafone or Idea, and out of these, 22 crore calls were on the Airtel network.
However, Airtel recently held talks with Reliance Jio to solve the issue, and has agreed to offer more POIs (points of interconnection). With the augmentation, the total number of ports would be three times the current interconnect points. Based on traffic pattern estimation with other operators, Airtel claims "this capacity is sufficient to serve over 15 million customers, which is significantly higher than Jio's existing customer base."
On Monday, Idea also stated that it would be adding 196 POIs to handle calls from as many as 6.5 million Reliance Jio users. According to Idea, "this additional capacity will provide for a buffer of 119 percent against the August subscriber base of 2.97 million".
One big reason why competitors aren't comfortable in giving additional POIs to Reliance Jio is because of asymmetry. While calls from Reliance Jio users to other networks would be substantially higher (owing to free voice calls), the opposite scenario would entail a much lower number of calls. Normally, the ratio should be 1:1, i.e., the number of outgoing and incoming calls from one operator to the other should be similar, in Jio's case, it's as high as 10:1 according to COAI (Cellular Operators Association of India).
Idea stated that it's seeing "unprecedented asymmetry of traffic of 14.5 times" between the two operators. "Never, ever, has such a high asymmetry been observed with a new operator in the past", it added.
However, refuting the claims by incumbents, Reliance Jio clarifies that "the voice traffic on its network is in line with industry trends and as expected for any new operator". While Jio consumers are making more outgoing calls since "a large proportion of these are new numbers that are not yet in the address book with whom they communicate", it mentions that as the customer base grows, the asymmetry will reduce and the traffic will become symmetric. It also added that its current outgoing traffic is less than two calls per customer per hour even during peak hours, which requires a reasonable number of POIs.
Jio also stated that it hopes that "incumbent operators will enhance the PoI's sufficient to meet their license obligation of QoS with immediate effect and maintain these parameters on an ongoing basis." As per the regulations, POI congestion should not affect more than 1 call in every 200 calls.
Related read: Reliance Jio vs Airtel vs Vodafone vs Idea tariffs
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