Major telcos for raising IUC, while Jio against it

Incumbent telecom operators — Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular — on Tuesday sought doubling of interconnection usage charge (IUC) from the present rate, while new entrant Reliance Jio for levying no charges on incoming calls.  

Telecom Regulatory Authority of India Chairman R S Sharma  said there are other charges that are part of IUC but 14 paise charge for handling domestic calls dominated the discussion during the workshop because of the high volume of calls that are subjected to these charges.

However, he did not give any time frame for firming up the IUC recommendations but said they will be finalised soon.

The IUC, also called as mobile call termination charges, is fixed by the Trai and currently the IUC of 14 paise per minute is levied on every domestic incoming calls by the telecom operator receiving it.  A mobile operator levies IUC for each incoming call it gets from the subscriber of another network.  In the meeting, some of the companies including Airtel, Vodafone and Idea reportedly said their cost of carrying incoming call is 30 paise or some time even more, and hence IUC should be raised so that they are able to recover their cost.

Claiming that they were unable to recover the basic cost from the current IUC rates, the firms said IUC should be raised so that telecom operators are able to recover cost of carrying load of incoming calls from other networks.  The new entrant Reliance Jio, however, batted for levying no charge on incoming calls.