TRAI (Telecom Regulatory Authority of India) today announced the revised interconnection usage charges (IUC) for domestic calls and slightly increased them for incoming international calls. To be more specific, the domestic IUC has been reduced to about 33% approximately and IUC for international calls has been increased to 40 paise instead of 30 paise presently.
Also, according to reports, it has been made clear that the reduction in domestic IUC would be affective for all types of calls such as Fixed to fixed, mobile to fixed, and fixed to mobile. And the above changes would be made effective 1st of April onwards.
For those who don’t know what exactly is Interconnection usage charges, it is the charge levied by the telecom company to whom a call is being terminated to. For example a call is being made by a Vodafone customer to Airtel customer, then Vodafone will have to pay some amount of IUC (as fixed by TRAI) to Airtel .
In the previous years, as and when there were changes in the IUC, the call tariff by the mobile phone operators also affected accordingly. According to TRAI, even this time, it expects this initiative to reduce domestic call charges in India as domestic IUC has been reduced to about 33 percent. Hope this step by Indian Telecom watch dog (TRAI) will bring down domestic call tariffs (specially in mobile phones).