Idea Cellular on Monday said that it is expanding its capacity to enable 6.5 million subscribers of Reliance Jio to connect to its network.

“In August, there were a total of 2.97 million unique Jio subscribers who terminated calls on the Idea network. Our current allocation of PoIs would in normal circumstances cater to 4.65 million such subscribers, indicating a buffer of 57 per cent in calling capacity. Idea has now decided to proactively expand capacity with Jio to over 6.5 million subscribers, with the release of 196 additional points of interconnect, shortly,” Idea Cellular said in a statement.

This additional capacity will provide for a buffer of 119 per cent against the August subscriber volumes.

Separately, TRAI has been informed that in August 2016, there existed an unprecedented 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,” Idea said in statement.

High costs

Idea has already submitted to the TRAI, via the “Accounting Separation Report” for FY16, that 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. The company says it is incurring increasing costs due to this high level of asymmetry.

“Unless controlled, this induced traffic asymmetry is expected to exacerbate the loss in the coming months. We await Regulatory intervention to address this fundamental issue of induced asymmetry of traffic,” the operator said.

On Friday, the telecom regulator had asked all incumbent operators to offer interconnection to RJio.

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