Starting New Year's Day, telcos in India are officially no longer required to pay each other for calls between their subscribers. The interconnect usage charge of 6 paise per minute is no longer a requirement. As such, Jio put out a press release over the holiday seeming to celebrate the move, by bragging that its customers would no longer have to pay the fee. The other telcos — Airtel and Vi — quickly sent out statements to the media (see below) clarifying that their networks had not been passing the IUC on to customers for a while, essentially meaning that Jio's announcement was less pathbreaking and more cementing an industry practice. At its infancy, Jio railed against the IUC, arguing that since it offered free calls to all numbers, a flat per-minute rate was unduly punishing its business model, especially with calls costing practically nothing to telcos. Legacy players resisted, moving to protect as many streams of revenue as they could in the face of Jio's destabilising entry into the telecom market. And so TRAI had extended the practice at ₹0.06 a minute in December last year, and that requirement finally ended on January 1. Other telcos had already braced for the change, and since Jio's penetration has made it such that the outgoing and incoming call traffic has more or less stabilised across telcos, everyone appeared to be prepared for the discontinuation of the IUC regime. Curiously though, according to a PTI report, the discontinuation of the IUC regime may…
