Major Telcos Blamed Jio for Heavy Network Congestion

The portion of daily call failures between Reliance Jio and India’s top three telcos has reduced comparatively. Calls with Bharti Airtel displayed the most improvement with the provisioning of additional points of interconnection (PoIs)

In a nutshell

Regular call failures between Jio and Airtel’s network is down to 56 per cent of all calls from nearly 73 per cent on September 23, whereas it is at 62 per cent with No. 3 Idea Cellular, compared with over 75 per cent previously. Call failure levels with Vodafone India, India’s no. 2 telcom, nonetheless continue to be as high as 75 per cent, though it’s a bit lower from the 83.5 per cent recorded earlier.

The call failure rates though are still far higher than the less than 0.5 per cent authorized by the Trai (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India). It has set October 17 as the deadline for incumbent mobile phone companies to abide by the quality of standards norms.

TRAI’s intervention

Questioned by regulator Trai to give reason for high level of call failures, incumbent operators Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular have quoted free voice calls issued by Reliance Jio as the reason for excessive network congestion.

The three companies made this statement in reply to showcause notice by Trai, which is now in the process of scrutinizing them and is likely to take a view in a week.

Though the three telcos major refused to respond to e-mail queries sent to them, as per sources, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular replied to TRAI saying that the carriers have recommended that the free voice calls by Reliance Jio is inciting people to use more minutes, hence causing an increased traffic at the interconnection points.

Sources further added that the incumbent operators have also taken the stance that termination charge of 14 paise per minute recommended under the present IUC regime is low and that they are incurring increasing costs because of the high level of traffic asymmetry.

The operators have also sought Trai to analyze the alleged violation of the telecom tariff order by Reliance Jio. Late last month, as row between incumbents and newcomer Reliance Jio extended, Trai had interfered and issued showcause notices to telecom operators for call drops far exceeding the norm. It had given operators ten days to provide for an explanation on why action should not be initiated against them for violation of service quality norms.

Over the past few months, Reliance Jio has clashed with incumbent operators over network connectivity or interconnection. Interconnection helps mobile users to make calls to customers of other telecom networks and is, thus, important for continuous functioning of mobile services.

Jio has blamed incumbent operators of providing far less than required points of interconnections (PoIs) needed for its users to make a call to its rival network, whereas the operators have charged the newcomer of releasing a huge amount of free traffic on their networks.

Jio has disclosed that its customers will enjoy the benefit of free voice calls for life, while data, currently free, would be available at a fraction of the prevailing market rates post December 31.

On 23rd Sept, the company had blamed that more than 12 crore calls failed daily between Jio and the networks of Airtel, Vodafone and Idea. As per quality of service rules, not more than five calls in 1,000 should fail due to network congestion.

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