Reliance Jio alleges rivals showing wirelines as mobile numbers for IUC rip-off

Amid the ongoing war of words over interconnect usage charges (IUC) among telcos, Reliance Jio has now alleged that the incumbent operators are fraudulently showing wireline numbers as mobile numbers to illegally extract 6 paise termination charge from it.

For perspective, the IUC for mobile to mobile calls are 6 paise per minute, but if the calls are terminating on landlines, the rate is zero. In a letter to Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai), Jio has said the operators including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea and BSNL, have implemented a process under which various enterprises are offered mobile numbers as their customer care or helpline numbers like in case of 8888888888 by Just Dial and 9313931393 by Oyo.

“In all these cases, the mobile number is used just as a virtual number for routing all such calls to respective call centre set-ups of these organisations operating on wire-line PRIs with hunting facilities,” Jio said in the letter, a copy of which has been seen by the Financial Express.