The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Tuesday deferred its decision to scrap interconnect usage charges (IUC) by one year to January 2021. As a result, operators will continue to earn 6 paise a minute for every mobile call they receive on their network till 31 December, 2020.
Scrapping the IUC or reducing it would benefit an operator with more outgoing traffic than incoming calls.
The latest move will come as a relief for Bharti Airtel Ltd and Vodafone Idea Ltd, which earn a portion of their revenue from IUC as their incoming traffic is higher than outgoing and were against the scrapping of IUC. Jio, on the other hand, wanted the charge scrapped.
