Jio 4G impacted by poor connectivity and lack of SIMs

Jio 4G Wi-Fi
Poor connectivity and lack of the availability of SIM cards have started impacting the 4G business of Reliance Jio Infocomm.

The Mukesh Ambani-promoted Reliance Jio started selling 4G SIMs on commercial basis from 5th September 2016 targeting to become the number of 4G operator in India. Reliance Jio, which has made $22 billion investment, is offering free voice and data services till 31st December. Its main rivals are yet to respond to Jio’s free offers to attract customers for switching over.

Reliance Jio, which has the 4G license for pan-India operations, is unable to offer adequate SIMs to meet the demand of its mobile customers.

“We will take at least 10 more days to activate the SIM cards which have been given to mobile users even before the official verification. We are also facing the shortage of Jio 4G SIMs,” said a retailer who is collecting Rs 50 to Rs 100 from hundreds of customers everyday for activating the 4G LTE connection.

Reliance Jio Infocomm

Reliance Jio has started receiving positive response from rival telecom network operators such as Bharti Airtel and Idea Cellular for interconnection to ensure better quality of services (QoS) to its mobile data users.

Reliance Jio admitted that 75 calls failed out of every 100 call attempts in recent weeks. In the last 10 days, more than 22 crore calls have failed on the Airtel network, while 52 crore calls have failed cumulatively on the networks of the three incumbent operators viz. Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular.

Jio claims that it has rolled out superior telecom network. Due to the POI congestion, Jio 4G users are not experiencing the superior services. Indian customers have not been able to enjoy RJIL’s free voice offer as a result of such anti-competitive behaviour of incumbent operators.

Jio says insufficient POIs is anti-competitive aimed at hindering the entry of a new telecom operator. Such hurdles result in poor experience for Jio customers who are trying to make calls to incumbent operators’ networks.

Reliance Jios’ outgoing traffic is less than 2 calls per customer per hour even during peak traffic period, which requires only a reasonable number of POIs. These calls are not to one operator but distributed over all the operators. Incumbent operators are describing such a modest call rate as a Tsunami of traffic from Jio.

Jio said asymmetry of traffic has nothing to do with the number of POIs required, which is based on the total traffic in both directions and not just in one direction. The equipments required for POI are two-way trunks, which mean that the same equipment is used for both directions. No additional equipment is needed for handling the calls coming from Jio to the other operator.

Baburajan K