Wednesday 9 October 2019

Reliance Jio will now charge 6 paise per minute as IUC charge

Jio has announced that it will charge customers for levying the IUC(Interconnect Usage Charge) charge on all outgoing calls to other networks for the time being from 10th of October 2019. Justifying the new charges, Jio said it has paid nearly Rs 13,500 crore as IUC charges to the rivals such as Bharti Airte and Vodafone Idea. in the last three years. The company said it has decided to charge customers to recover the IUC losses. Jio, however, said these charges are not applicable on calls made by Jio users to other Jio phones and to landline phones and calls made using WhatsApp, FaceTime and other such platforms. Incoming calls from all networks will continue to be free.

Telecom regulator TRAI in 2017 had slashed the interconnect usage charge (IUC) to 6 paise per minute from 14 paise and had said this regime will end by January 2020. But it has now floated a consultation paper to review whether the regime timeline needs to be extended.


Jio has come up with a few IUC plans that customers can purchase in order to make calls to other networks.Jio will provide additional data entitlement of equivalent value based on IUC top-up voucher consumption. This will ensure no increase in tariff for customers.
New Jio IUC plans
Jio is offering four new IUC plans with extra data benefits. Here are all the plans listed with the benefits:
--Rs 10 plan will offer 124 minutes of IUC minutes to non-Jio numbers and 1GB data.
--Rs 20 plan will offer 249 minutes of IUC minutes to non-Jio numbers and 2GB data.
--Rs 50 plan will offer 656 minutes of IUC minutes to non-Jio numbers and 5GB data.
--Rs 100 plan will offer 1,362 minutes of IUC minutes to non-Jio numbers and 10GB data.