Vodafone to triple points of interconnect with Reliance Jio

NEW DELHI: Vodafone India is the latest incumbent telecom operator to agree to increasing the points of interconnect (PoIs) with Reliance Jio Infocomm. The company on Thursday said it will increase the number of PoIs to three times what it is providing to Jio at present. Jio however said the numbers disclosed by Vodafone were "substantially less" than what it had sought.

Vodafone’s statement comes within days of Bharti Airtel and Idea Cellular agreeing to augment the PoIs with Jio to service 1.5 crore customers and 65 lakh customers, respectively.

The incumbent telcos, which were initially defiant, agreed to provide additional PoIs to Jio after the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) called a meeting of all the four parties last Friday.

Jio complained that 75 out of 100 calls made on its network were failing because the incumbents refused to provide it additional PoIs — these are required to take calls made on one network to another.

While Vodafone said it has always provided PoIs to other operators for all their fair, reasonable and legitimate requirements and will continue to do so, Jio disagreed. Responding to Vodafone’s statement, Jio said it has been writing regularly to Vodafone regarding its requirement for interconnection capacity over the last few months.

"The situation has deteriorated significantly in the last few weeks, with over 80 calls failing out of every 100 call attempts. In the last 10 days alone, over 15 crore RJIL calls have failed on the Vodafone network," Jio said.

"Following guidance from TRAI and clarifications from Jio regarding its commercial launch, Vodafone India has decided to increase the PoIs between the two operators by thrice and accordingly increase the capacity to connect," the company said.

Jio’s however said it hoped Vodafone will further enhance the PoIs sufficiently to meet their license obligation of QoS with immediate effect and maintain these parameters.

Vodafone on the other hand said it is hopeful all issues it has raised with TRAI and Jio will be considered and resolved at the earliest. It didn’t elaborate the details.