Last updated on July 26th, 2020 at 03:44 pm
The Interconnect Usage Charges (IUC) term is now popular after Reliance Jio’s decision to charge its mobile customers for their voice calls made to mobile numbers of other telecom networks like Airtel, Vodafone, BSNL etc. Some of customers may be not knowing what is this new term IUC so let us understand it.
Telecom networks of all telecom operators are connected at a common point that is called Trunk Automatic Exchange (TAX) and all voice calls passes through this TAX. Suppose a Jio customer made a call to BSNL customer then this voice call will pass through TAX and ring the customer of BSNL on BSNL network.
IUC is a small fee that one telecom operator pays to another for passing voice calls through this TAX. The system of IUC started long back when BSNL started its mobile services in around 2002. At that time IUC were high but now it has reduced 6 paise per minutes.
At time, when Jio started all free calls schemes, IUC were 14 paise per minutes but in spite of that Jio were offering free calls to all operators because almost all telecom operators were receiving almost same volume of voice calls. Since customer base of Jio has increased many fold and they are making free voice calls to other telecom operators for which Reliance Jio had paid nearly Rs 13,500 crore in IUC to other network providers in the last three years but had not received same amount from them so it is a net loss to Jio for free calling service to other telecom operators.
Jio launched following top-up for making outgoing calls to other telecom operators. Jio also offer 1GB of free data on every Rs 10 recharge.
Soon, all other operators may also announce similar IUC packs as soon as their free outgoing call volume will cross incoming calls
Concluding, the free voice calls on other telecom operators is going to end, they will continue to offer free calling on their own network only.