Never charged customers for IUC: Airtel

New Delhi

Telecom major Bharti Airtel on Friday said that it has never charged customers separately for Interconnect Usage Charges (IUC) and its unlimited free call benefits will continue.

COO Ajai Puri said in a statement that Airtel mobile customers already enjoy unlimited free calls to all networks with Airtel's prepaid bundles and postpaid plans.

"At Airtel, we are obsessed with delivering the best-in-class experience to our customers. Airtel mobile customers already enjoy unlimited free calls to all networks with our prepaid bundles and postpaid plans that also offer large dollops of high speed  data," he said.

"In fact, Airtel has never charged its customers separately for IUC and the unlimited calling benefits will continue for our customers without any change," Puri added.

The statement comes a day after Reliance Jio Infocomm announced that it will make all domestic calls free starting January 1, as IUC for all domestic voice calls comes to an end.

The zero IUC regime was earlier scheduled to come into effect from January 2020, but the implementation was deferred till January 1, 2021.

IUC is an inter-operator charge which is paid by a telecom service provider to another telco when its customers make voice calls to subscribers of the other network.