Reliance Jio will now charge 6 paise per minute for calls to other networks

Reliance Jio has announced that it will start to charge for outgoing voice calls to other networks. The company will now start charging its prepaid and postpaid users 6 paise per minute for outgoing calls to Airtel, Vodafone, BSNL and others.

The company has said that this will not affect calls to landline phones or incoming calls. To compensate for the chargeable calls, Jio will be offering free data of equivalent value with top-up vouchers.

For prepaid users, outgoing calls to other operators will be charged 6 paise per minute from their Talk time amount. In the case of postpaid plans, customers will now be billed at 6 paise per minute for off-network calls and will be entitled to more free data.

The company has introduced special IUC (Interconnect Usage) Top-Up vouchers for prepaid users which will offer free outgoing minutes and data as well. For now, there are four IUC Vouchers available for Rs 10, Rs 20, Rs 50 and Rs 100.

The cheapest Rs 10 voucher offers 124 minutes of outgoing voice calls to other networks and 1GB of data The Rs 20 voucher provides users with 249 minutes of off-net outgoing calls and 2GB data. The Rs 50 IUC voucher brings 656 minutes of outgoing voice calls to other networks and 5GB data. The top of the line Rs 100 voucher offers 1,362 minutes of non-Jio outgoing calls and 10GB data.

Postpaid users will be directly billed 6 paise per minute with additional data similar to that offered to prepaid users.

Jio also confirmed that it will remove levying charges to users for offset calls once Interconnect Usage Charges or IUC becomes zero. IUC is the cost paid by one telecom company to another when users make outgoing calls to users on other networks. Fixed by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India, IUC charges are said to be done away starting from January 1, 2020, and Reliance Jio says this will be a temporary change that is set to end by December 31, 2019.