IUC-laced tariff balanced out with high data entitlements: Jio

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Reliance Jio customers have to buy four top IUC top-up vouchers to be able to call another network post its decision to charge 6 paise a minute for such calls to rivals.

Jio will provide additional data entitlement of equivalent value based on IUC top-up voucher consumption. This will ensure no increase in tariff for customers, the company has announced.

Broking firm Emkay Financial said under an update on "Jio's strategic ‘MOVE'; Tariff hike strategy or counter to TRAI on IUC? that "JIO has launched 4 top-up recharge plans ranging from Rs 10-50, with 124-1,362 mins (exJIOPhone users) and per-minute cost to consumer at 12 paisa (double that of IUC charge)" .

The IUC top-up voucher amounts are Rs 10 which gives 124 IUC minutes to non-Jio mobiles with 1GB free data.

A Rs 20 voucher gives 249 IUC minutes to non-Jio mobiles and with 2 GB data. Rs 50 top-up entails a Jio customer 656 IUC minutes to non-Jio mobiles and 5 GB data. A 100 top-up voucher has 1,362 IUC minutes to non-Jio mobile and 10 GB of data.

This is as per company announcement on October 9 when Jio suddenly and immediately announced to go pay for calls to other networks after being free on voice for three years.

This will be the first time that Jio users will pay for voice calls.

Jio announced a strategic move to start charging 6 paisa/min for Off-net calls until IUC is scrapped (January 20 for now).

Jio said post-paid customers will be billed at 6 paise per minute for off-net outgoing calls with increase in free data entitlement to the extent as per their top-up IUC voucher.

"As per our calculations, Jio's ARPU Increase stands at Rs 17. In our view, Bharti and VIL (Vodafone Idea) will also go for hikes for its bundled subscribers (48-57 per cent of subs base)", Emkay said.

"We believe competition will follow suit with tariff hikes for their bundled plan subscribers, which should result in an ARPU increase of Rs 7 and Rs 4 for Bharti and VIL, respectively. Jio, on the other hand, will witness an ARPU increase of Rs 17 following the move," it added.

Jio has said that its network receives 250-300 million missed calls on a daily basis.

The 250-300 million missed calls per day should have resulted in 650-750 million minutes of incoming traffic to Jio. Instead, the call backs made by the JIO customers result in 650-750 million minutes of outgoing traffic.

"But for the effects of the tariff differential, especially the missed call phenomenon, the offnet voice traffic is already symmetrical now for Jio. It is being made asymmetric by the other operators by keeping their 2G voice tariffs high," is the argument of Jio as per the Emkay report.

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