Jio starts charging for calls and its punters aren’t happy about it

Disruptive Indian operator Reliance Jio has announced it will start charging its customers for calls to other networks due to a regulatory change.

Until now Jio had been swallowing the 6 paise (hundredths of a rupee) per minute interconnect usage charge (IUC) incurred when its users called someone on another network. This formed part of the super-aggressive pricing strategy designed to steal market share from the incumbents, which was an unqualified success.

The cunning plan seemed to be to follow the classic internet business model of focusing on building up a massive user base first, then working out how to get cash out of them later. But now Jio seems to be going back on that and is looking to recoup that IUC from its users, who aren’t too happy about the sudden moving of the billing goalposts.

Jio is insisting it’s just as much of a victim in this situation and is only introducing the charge because the Indian telecoms regulator – TRAI – is mucking it about over plans to scrap the IUC entirely next year. In the press release announcing the news charge Jio goes into great length about how often TRAI said the charge would be scrapped by the end of this year, but then claims it’s having a rethink – hence the new charges.

As well as blaming TRAI, and also to some extent the other operators, who it accuses of some kind of poor form too arcane to dwell on, Jio is also attempting to sugar the pill by throwing in some ‘free’ data in exchange for money spent. Free must have a different meaning over in India. Here’s the table it has sent its punters announcing the new state of affairs.

If Indian Twitter is anything to go by, this hasn’t gone down well among the millions of Indians who switched to Jio, seduced by all the actual free stuff, as opposed to free stuff you have to pay for. The hashtag #boycottjio is trending, with the tweet below a typical example of the kind of stuff it’s yielding.

We don’t know why TRAI is having another look at this IUC thing; maybe Jio has been naughty, maybe the other operators have lobbied against it, maybe TRAI just thinks Jio is getting a bit big for its boots and need knocking down a peg or two. Alternatively the TRIA decision could be nothing new and Jio is just using it as a smokescreen to start taking back some of its freebies. Regardless of the reasons this may represent Jio’s first major setback since taking the Indian telecoms world by storm. This video alone is unlikely to resolve it.