Unable to Make Calls from Reliance Jio? Blame Airtel and Vodafone

BY Ben Patterson

Published 6 Nov 2016

Reliance Jio

It has been over a couple of months since Reliance Jio launched commercially in India. The free Jio Preview offer under which the carrier is offering unlimited calls, 4G data, and SMS to all customers who buy a Jio SIM before December 4th has led to a hoard of people switching over to it.

This has also led to new Jio subscribers making a sea of calls to Vodafone, Airtel, Idea and other mobile networks in India. And due to the insufficient amount of Point of Interconnects (POI) provided by these operators, most calls from Reliance Jio to other non-Jio networks have been unable to go through, with the caller being greeted with “network busy” or “routes on this lines are currently busy” error. Reliance has claimed that insufficient POIs provided by Airtel alone has led to almost 2 crore call failures per day. Reliance is also to be blamed here though as the company seems to have been unprepared for the hoard of new subscribers and handling crores of calls every day.

Thankfully, in the last couple of weeks, things have improved greatly, with calls from Reliance Jio to other networks finally going through. Due to pressure from TRAI, Vodafone, Idea, AirTel, and other operators have released additional POIs for Reliance Jio over the last few weeks. This has led to a significant decrease in the “network busy” or “all routes on this lines are currently busy” error that Jio subscribers were usually getting while placing calls to non-Jio networks.

So, if you were frustrated with the inability to make calls with your new Reliance Jio number, try again.