Idea Cellular on Friday said that it will be providing over 230% additional capacity to Reliance Jio, saying that Quality of Service for its customers is top priority. Reliance Jio later said that it has been intimated by Idea Cellular regarding Idea’s decision to provide additional POIs in the next few days.
It also said that over 750 calls per 1,000 are failing per day between Idea and Jio networks, which translates to 4 crore calls failing per day. Over 12 crore calls fail daily between Jio and the networks of Airtel, Vodafone and Idea.
Jio also said that the response by Idea to the severe Quality of Service issues faced between the Idea and Jio networks is disappointing and displays lack of intent on Idea’s part to resolve this critical issue.
Idea said that it has now provisioned 1,865 ports for access, from the 565 earlier, a 230% increase in capacity. It also said that National Long Distance (NLD) capacity is also being expanded by nearly 50%.
Jio said the current number of interconnects between Jio and Idea for access was 725 and this was proposed to be augmented by 1000, which is just 38% increase. For long distance, the current interconnects were 207, which would be increased to 250, thereby resulting in 21% rise.
| Particular – Number of E1s | Access | NLD | Total |
| Current (operational plus being augmented) | 725 | 207 | 932 |
| Proposed Augmentation for Jio Outgoing | 1000 | 250 | 1250 |
| Percentage increase | 38% | 21% | 34% |
In a statement Idea said:
Idea 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.
With this capacity expansion, more than 2,100 ports will now be available for traffic between Idea and Jio, allowing sufficient buffer for the future.
Reliance Jio said:
Only 50 new E1s have been operationalised by Idea in the last 10 days as a result of which call failure rate has been increasing drastically.
As against certain media statements, the proposed augmentation by Idea increases capacity by only 34%, which is grossly inadequate.
Even the proposed augmented capacity is less than 40% of the initial firm demand placed by RJIL based on transparent workings shared with Idea several months ago. RJIL fails to understand how the 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 insofar as it is being reflected as a favour to Jio.
Last week Airtel and Vodafone promised to make the total number of PoIs between them and Jio three times the present number of PoIs. However, Jio said that 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.