Even as call failures on Reliance Jio’s network have come down at around 28% with India’s largest telcos, Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular releasing additional points of interconnection (PoIs), the Mukesh Ambani-led telco has started limiting free voice calls to just 30 minutes per call, according to a Maktechblog report.
BGR India has also reported that a number of Jio users have complained about voice calls being cut at exactly the 30 minute mark. Reliance Jio kicked off commercial operations on September 5 with the launch of its “Welcome Offer”, which comes with free unlimited calls and 4GB data per day till December 31, 2016. Besides, the telco is also offering free access to its digital app ecosystem. Notably, Reliance Jio’s website or app doesn’t mention the 30 minute cut-off time for voice calls anywhere.
BGR said that the move could be a measure to reduce the congestion on the networks. Jio has been claiming that the congestion is a result of inadequate interconnection capacity from India’s top telecom operators.
The PoIs have been a point of contention between Jio and the incumbent telcos, with the new entrant accusing the existing ones of not providing adequate PoIs to stymie its operations and acting in an anti-competitive manner. Jio’s rivals have maintained that they have released more than enough PoIs and well in time, and blamed shortfalls in Jio’s network due to which released PoIs aren’t being operationalized. Jio has denied these charges.
Interconnection enables mobile users to make calls to customers of other networks and is, therefore, crucial for smooth functioning of mobile services. The dispute forced the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) to intervene. The regulator has since pulled up the incumbent telcos and recommended a Rs 3,050 crore cumulative penalty on Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular for denying interconnection capacity to Jio.
The latest data available on the Mukesh Ambani-owned new telco’s website updated on Thursday said that roughly 8.5 crore out of about 30 crore call attempts by Jio’s users to the three operators failed on November 7, with around 50-60% call failure rates earlier this month.
About 34% of the 13.81 crore call attempts made to Airtel from Jio failed, according to data. The failure rate on the Vodafone network stood at 26.7 percent out of 8.79 crore calls, while Idea network had the lowest call failure rate at 18.9 percent out of 7.48 crore calls.
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