After some bilateral discussions with Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd., Bharti Airtel has agreed to provide additional PoI (also called as Point of Interconnection) to Jio and the current largest service provider in India has extended an invitation to Jio to discuss its requirement of additional PoI.
In the press release sent to us, Bharti Airtel mentions “Airtel is a responsible organization committed to complying with the regulations and the Interconnect Agreements in letter and spirit and will continue to be so.”
Airtel has already been providing the PoIs to Jio and this is even before Jio’s commercial operations begin from January 1st, 2017. Thanks to the latest agreement, the total number of PoIs will become 3 times the present number of PoIs. Based on the current traffic pattern with all other operators, this capacity is sufficient to serve over 15 million customers, which is significantly higher than Jio’s existing customer base.
While doing so, Airtel mentions that it will have to take note of the asymmetry in the volume of traffic between Jio and Airtel and has to ensure that the quality of service for the current Airtel subscribers is maintained and has no impact. Airtel also hopes that TRAI looks into the asymmetric traffic and hopes that the free calls that terminate on Airtel’s network don’t negatively affect the network.
Recently, there has been a lot of tussle between the network providers since the launch of Jio 4G network because the current network providers aren’t being paid the Interconnect fee that is usually paid by the calling network and these are the termination charges, which are set as a fixed cost right now. Jio being an IP network, the provider says that the call from its network is a data-based call and thus it cannot pay a fee for the same, and this doesn’t have a solution right now. Till then, Jio is having bilateral talks with the network providers to see if they are happy in providing the Interconnect points till the commercial launch happens.
