Idea to expand interconnect points to Jio, says asymmetry of traffic causing higher costs

NEW DELHI: Idea Cellular Monday said that it has decided to proactively expand Points of Interconnect (POIs) capacity with the release of 196 additional points that could now cater to Reliance Jio’s over 6.5 million subscribers.

The telco however said that it is incurring increasing costs due to an asymmetry of traffic of 14.5 times between Idea and Jio.

“Never, ever, has such a high asymmetry been observed with a new operator in the past… its real cost of termination is significantly higher than the current interconnect settlement charge of 14 paise per minute as prescribed in the present IUC regime," Idea said in a statement.

"Unless controlled, this induced traffic asymmetry is expected to exacerbate the loss in the coming months,” the telco said.

The telco added that it is awaiting a regulatory intervention to address this fundamental issue of induced asymmetry of traffic and ensure compliance to the existing regulatory principles of IUC compliance.

“We are hopeful that the TRAI will urgently examine these threshold issues and will ensure that all parties are compliant to the letter and spirit of the law,” it said.

The country’s third largest telecom operator said that its current allocation of POIs in normal circumstances caters to 4.65 million such subscribers indicating a buffer of 57% in calling capacity.

The additional capacity will provide for a buffer of 119% against the August subscriber volumes.

In the month of August 2016, a total of 2.97 million unique Jio subscribers terminated calls on the Idea network, the Aditya Birla group company said in
the statement.

The telco said that it “welcomes Jio, and remains committed to facilitate its seamless entry into the hyper-competitive market.”

“Idea Cellular has in the past been providing and augmenting Points of Interconnect (POIs) very liberally and we will continue to support all new operators for all their reasonable, fair and legitimate requirements of POIs,” the operator said.

Bharti Airtel on Friday had also said that it will continue its efforts to augment the hundreds of points of interconnect (PoI) already given to Reliance Jio, as per the bilateral agreement signed between both the telecom operators. It had also asked the Trai to review the IUC charge in Jio's case due to the huge traffic imbalance.