Jio turns up the heat over IUC, accuses rivals of fraud
NEWDELHI: Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd has accused rival telecom operators of masquerading fixed landline numbers as mobile numbers to earn undue revenue through the interconnect usage charge (IUC).
In a letter to the telecom regulator, Jio termed this a “fraudulent attempt” by Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea and Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd, for which they must be penalised.
“The incumbent operators have implemented a process under which various enterprises are offered mobile numbers as their customer care or helpline numbers. In these cases, the mobile number is used just as a virtual number for routing all such calls to call centres,” Jio said in a letter dated October 14. Mint has seen a copy of the letter.
This exercise, Jio has alleged, changes the nature of the call from “mobile to wireline” to “mobile to mobile” to illegally extract IUC at 6 paise a minute.
Jio has also alleged that incumbent operators are not only earning IUC revenue illegally but are also denying Jio of the revenue it should earn at 52 paise a minute that originating operators earn for calls made to universal access and toll-free numbers.
“We suspect that thousands of such numbers are operational in the market deployed by incum- bent operators,” Jio said in the letter.
“Such illegal, fraudulent and cheating practice has resulted in millions of minutes originating on Jio network getting considered as mobile terminating minutes instead of wireline termination, not only causing huge loss in hundreds of crores to Jio and undue enrichment to incumbent operators but also to influence the authority on apparent traffic asymmetry between Jio and incumbents, which is the only reason cited by the authority to review IUC regulations,” Jio alleged.
“This seems like an attempt by Jio to misguide Trai (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) in the run-up to the consultation on IUC,” an Airtel spokesperson said. “Enterprise customers referred to by Jio transfer their call to their unique number to a fixed line or another mobile number as this is permitted by the DoT (department of telecommunications). There is no loss to originating operator as the customer always dials a mobile and not a fixed line number,” the spokesperson added.
Emails sent to Vodafone Idea and BSNL remained unanswered till press time.
Jio’s fresh salvo comes in the midst of the latest controversy over IUC which erupted after Trai last month said it will review its decision to scrap the charge from January 1, 2020.
IUC, which has been set at 6 paise a minute, is levied by mobile networks handling incoming calls from rival networks.