Reliance Jio on October 9 announced it will charge customers six paise per minute for voice

calls made to rival phone networks such as Airtel and Vodafone. The telecom operator,
however, promised consumers to compensate them by giving free data of equal value.

Jio said the six paisa charge will remain in place till the time telecom operators are required
to pay rivals for mobile phone calls made by their users to other operators' network under
the interconnect usage charge (IUC) that is the charge paid by a telecom operator to another
operator for its customers when they are calling customers of the other telecom operator. At
present, IUC is 6p/min

Reliance was paying the IUC for its Jio customers from its reserves (nearly 13500 Cr) and kept
the talktime free for customers but now it has started charging so that it fills its depleting
reserves/profits. Earlier it used to only charge for data.

Vodafone Idea termed such movement to be ‘act of urgent haste’ to hurt the revenues of
other operators with its recent unilateral action of reducing ringing time. (Jio reduced from
45 to 30 sec followed by Airtel from 45 to 25 sec)

For this the customers will have to recharge their top-up vouchers or shun Jio – until TRAI
reviews the timeline for zero termination charge regime which was initially slated from Jan 1,
2020.