Airtel provides over 17,000 PoIs to Jio

Bharti Airtel, India's largest telecommunications services provider, has provided an additional 7,000 additional Points of Interconnect (PoIs) to Reliance Jio Infocomm, the Delhi-based company said in a statement.

This increases the total number of PoIs provided till date to over 17,000.

This capacity is sufficient to serve over 75 million customers, based on the forecast provided by Jio to Airtel.

This will also ensure that the quality of service (QoS) is maintained and the customers are not inconvenienced, the Airtel statement said.

''Our regulatory obligations permit us to provide interconnect in a period of 90 days. With this augmentation Airtel has provided Jio capacity that is comparable to operators with six to eight times the customer base of Jio, in mere nine weeks of their launch,'' RJio said in a statement.

''We now request Jio to ensure that the additional POIs, that we have made available at a staggering pace, be operationalised with the same alacrity,'' it said.

In addition Jio has already provided Airtel with the future requirements for capacities at 100 million customers. ''As and when they ramp up their current subscriber base, we will further augment capacities ahead of time, as we have always done,'' it added.

In a separate statement, RJIo said that the 7,007 additional POIs were provided by Airtel consequent to the meetings of between the communications minister and TRAI Chairman with the CEOs of Airtel, Vodafone, Idea and RJio earlier this week.

''This allocation was long overdue considering the severe hardships caused to the customers of both operators in being able to connect voice calls between the two networks. More than 280 crore calls have failed between RJio and Airtel over the last three-and-a-half month because of absolute shortage of POI capacity,'' it added.

RJio also said there has not been any delay in operationalising POIs at its end.