Reliance Jio vs Airtel: Will Continue to Monitor Points of Interconnect Issue, Says TRAI

With the war of words between Airtel and Reliance Jio over Points of Interconnect (PoI) showing no signs of slowing down, sector regulator TRAI has stressed that POI is a "consumer" issue that it will keep track of.

"We have been deliberating on this issue ... It is not an issue of (operator) A versus B. It is an issue of consumers," TRAI Chairman RS Sharma said on the sidelines of IAMAI Digital Summit. Noting that TRAI had intervened into the issue, Sharma said the regulator will continue to look at the situation.

On Tuesday, Mukesh Ambani-promoted Reliance Jio termed as "malicious and misleading," rival Airtel's claim that it has provided sufficient interconnect capacity to Jio and that latter has been unable to activate all the points of interconnect (PoIs) and utilise the said capacity.

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"This latest statement is a continuation of Airtel's ongoing mischievous and motivated campaign to divert attention from its anti-competitive and anti-consumer actions and violations of license conditions which are being investigated by the authorities," Jio said on Tuesday.

Over 53 percent of the national long distance (NLD) calls are failing due to "inadequate" PoIs from Airtel, Reliance Jio has alleged.

"In spite of intervention by authorities and censure proceedings against Airtel, NLD call failure rate was at 53.4 percent as against TRAI norm of 0.5 percent. There has always been a lag in PoIs required and PoIs provided by Airtel resulting in severe service issues for Indian customers," Jio had said.

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Reliance Jio's comments were in response to an Airtel statement saying that it had provided the disruptive operator with sufficient interconnect points, which it had been unable to use. Bharti Airtel had said, "The PoIs have been provided well above the customer growth projection provided by Jio to Airtel. The capacity provided is ideal for serving over 190 million customers on the Jio network and is more than double of the 72.5 million total customers currently claimed by Reliance Jio."

Jio has been unable to activate all the points of interconnect (PoIs) and utilise the capacity provided, Airtel had alleged.