War of words continue - Reliance Jio says Airtel’s latest statement on PoI is “malicious”, “misleading”, “defamatory”

Reliance Jio lashes at Bharti Airtel on its latest statement calling it “malicious and misleading”. In a new statement, Mukesh Ambani led Reliance Jio reacts on Airtel’s statement on point of interconnection, “it is continuation of Airtel’s ongoing mischievous and motivated campaign to divert attention from its anti-competitive and anti-consumer actions and violations of license conditions.”, the company said.

Jio disputes Airtel’s claim of having provided 35,000 POIs calling it “misleading”, whereas Airtel said that the company has provided highest number of PoIs to Jio compared to other operators. Jio lashed back calling the comparison arbitrary, “Airtel has indulged in a completely arbitrary comparison of POIs allocated to other operators as against those allocated to RJIL. Traffic from no two operators will be alike and operators must not try to control the traffic from their customers.” Jio also claims that Airtel is trying to delay the process of allocating PoIs by bringing up payment related issues. Airtel in its statement said, “The PoIs have been provided well above the customer growth projection provided by Jio to Airtel. The capacity provided is ideal for serving over 190 million customers on the Jio network and is more than double of the 72.5 million total customers currently claimed by Jio.” Jio responded by saying, “The fact is that over 2.6 crore NLD calls are still failing daily amounting to 53.4% call failure (as on 31-Jan-2017) as against TRAI norm of 0.5%”. The company further added that there are no call failures in Jio-to-Jio calls.

Reliance Jio versus Airtel fight has now moved to Competition commission of India, Airtel recently moved CCI against Jio alleging predatory pricing and Jio had earlier filed complaint against incumbents for allegedly abusing their dominant market position and also forming a cartel to deny Jio PoIs.