Reliance today announced a monumental change for all its Jio customers. When Jio was launched in 2016, the company made a promise to its customers: Free Calls for a lifetime. Unfortunately, that promise was broken today by introducing call charges to other networks. 322 Million Jio Users will now have to recharge their number for an additional amount to make calls to operators other than Jio. Now Jio would start charging its customers 6 paise/minute for calls made to rival operators.
What Exactly has Changed?
The Calls which were essentially free earlier will now be made a chargeable per-minute basis. Jio Customers would now have to recharge their Jio number to make calls to other users on other networks such as Airtel, Vodafone, and BSNL. Jio users will be charged 6 paise/minute for calls made to other networks from the Jio network. Jio also announced that the users doing the recharges made to be given free data vouchers and that would essentially make the recharge free.
| IUC Top-Up Voucher Amount (Rs) |
IUC Minutes (other operators) |
Free Data (GB) |
| 10 | 124 | 1 |
| 20 | 249 | 2 |
| 50 | 656 | 5 |
This would be a big deal for customers who are accustomed to paying only one time for a long duration. The Free Data which Jio will provide with the IUC Top-Up Voucher will be a good deal for heavy data users. The only disappointment is that Jio customers wouldn’t know whether they are calling to a Jio number or a non-Jio number and that would lead to an ambiguous amount of recharges.
Why will Jio start charging for calls from Customers now?
Jio said that it paid more than Rs 13000 crore in Inter-Connection Usage Charges from the time the company was introduced. Inter-Connection Usage Charges are paid by telecom operators to TRAI for calls made to other networks. TRAI has long proposed for the abolition of these charges but has never implemented it. According to the latest report, TRAI would abolish these IUC Charges from 1st January 2020. Jio said in its press release that the company expects TRAI to abolish these charges 3 months from now.
This would mean that Jio customers will still be able to call for free from 1st January 2020 if the TRAI order is passed.
What Doesn’t Change?
Jio calls would still be free for :
a) all Jio to Jio calls;
(b) all incoming calls;
(c) Jio to landline calls; and
(d) calls made using WhatsApp or FaceTime and similar platforms.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnSgLrNT9Z4
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