After spat with Airtel, Jio now faults Idea for call drops

Hours after GSM operator Idea Cellular said it would provide 230 per cent additional capacity to Reliance Jio Infocomm, the Mukesh Ambani-led company accused the latter of severe 'quality of service' (QoS) issues, saying there was a drop of 4 crore calls per day between the operators' networks.

"The response by Idea to the severe QoS issues faced between the Idea Cellular and RJio networks is disappointing and displays lack of intent on Idea's part to resolve this critical issue," RJio said in a statement.

It added, "Adequate interconnection capacity so that call failure rate is less than 5 per 1,000 is a license obligation of all telecom operators. As against this, 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.

"This is a breach of license conditions by the incumbent operators and severely impacts customer interests. This is against zero call failures on the Jio network," Jio claimed.

According to RJIo only 50 new interconnections 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 per cent, which is grossly inadequate, it claimed.

"Even the proposed augmented capacity is less than 40 per cent of the initial firm demand placed by RJio," it said, "adding the manner of release of new capacity by Idea and the other incumbent operators is disillusioning as is being reflected as a favour to Jio."

Earlier in the day, Idea said it has agreed to further enhance capacity in both access and long distance interconnection by providing over 230 per cent additional capacity.

Idea also said it has provisioned 1,865 ports for access, from 565 earlier, while national long-distance capacity is also being expanded by nearly 50 per cent.

With this huge capacity expansion, over 2,100 ports will now be available for traffic between Idea and Jio, allowing sufficient buffer for the future, the Aditya Birla Group company said.

Idea Cellular is India's third-largest national mobile operator, with over 175 million subscribers.

With traffic in excess of 2 billion minutes a day, Idea ranks among the Top 6 country operators in the world.