India’s largest telecom operator Reliance Jio is breaking its three-year-old promise to keep voice calls free. Now the company will start charging 6 paise per minute for calls made to other network operators. Jio to Jio calls will still be free.
These are IUC charges that Jio has to pay to other operators when a Jio customer calls to a person using any other operators’ network. Jio has promised to compensate by offering free additional data. The company has announced IUC top-up vouchers that give IUC minutes and free data.
Here are the top-up vouchers. You can buy any of these based on your call usage.
Jio claims that it has been suffering the IUC burden of calls from the Jio network to 2G networks on Airtel and Vodafone-Idea. The company further says that it receives 25-30 crore missed calls daily by 2G users that results in 65-75 crore minutes of outgoing traffic. For all these calls, the company is paying IUC charges to other operators. In the last three years, it has paid nearly Rs 13,500 crore as net IUC charges.
Jio has been asking TRAI to remove the IUC charges for long but other operators who are still serving 2G customers. Airtel serves 400 million 2G customers who cannot access 4G VoLTE services. TRAI is expected to remove the IUC charge by December 31, 2019.
