Cutting of international call termination charges may cost dear to telcos

Adding to the woes of the embattled telecom sector, the telecom regulator may cut international call termination or interconnect usage charges by half.

This comes on the back of excessive use of data driven apps that allow subscribers to make international calls at a fraction of the cost of a voice call.

After reducing IUC charges in India to 6 paise per minutes, TRAI may motion to cut international termination charges to 25-30 paise per minute, a report by Money Control said.

Whatsapp and FaceTime among other apps offer high quality voice and video calls.

The current charges of international interconnect charges amount to 53 paise per minute.

The halving of calling charges was estimated to swipe Rs 5,000 crore in revenues from incoming international calls, a report by ET said.

Most of these international calls terminated on Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea’s network.

The incumbent carriers always favoured hiking international calling rates to Rs 1 initially and Rs 3.50 later on.

TRAI had raised the international termination charges to 53 paise per minute from 40 paise in February 2015, while cutting the mobile termination charges to 14 paise per minute from 20 paise per minute.

“Another issue raised in the CP (consultation paper) was about prescribing International Termination Charge and Prescription of revenue share between Indian ILDO (international long distance) and access provider in the International Termination Charge. The Authority is of the view that there is a need of more deliberation on the issue, and therefore, the Authority will issue separate regulation on this issue,” TRAI said in September 2017.

The number of international calls made to India were comparatively lesser than those originating from the country.

Nearly 4.5 billion calls originate from India to overseas markets, while 88 billion calls are made to India on an average, Cellulars Association of Operators in India (COAI) report to TRAI revealed.