Vodafone offers to triple interconnect points, Jio says inadequate

New Delhi, Sep 15: Vodafone India on Thursday said it had decided to increase its points of interconnect (PoIs) with Reliance Jio three-fold -- a move which the new player has welcomed but still found it short of actual requirement. "Vodafone India has always provided the PoI to other operators for all their fair, reasonable and legitimate requirements and will continue to do so," a company statement here said. "Following guidance from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) and clarifications from Jio regarding its commercial launch, Vodafone India has decided to increase its POI with Jio three-fold and accordingly increase the capacity to connect. Vodafone is hopeful that all issues it has raised with TRAI and Jio will be duly considered and resolved at the earliest," the statement added. Reliance Jio said the decision was welcome, but with a caveat. "The quantum of POIs proposed to be released by Vodafone as per its press release is substantially less than the requirement estimated based on transparent workings shared with Vodafone," it said in a statement. The company said while it has been writing regularly to Vodafone, no action was taken for the last several weeks, resulting in non-compliance of regulations on quality of service that mandates that PoI congestion should not affect more than 1 call in every 200 calls made. "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," it said. "Reliance Jio hopes Vodafone will enhance the PoI's sufficiently to meet their license obligation of quality of service with immediate effect and maintain these parameters on an ongoing basis."