Reliance Industries Limited chairman Mukesh Ambani, on February 21 announced the Reliance Jio Prime membership plan for the current Reliance Jio users. However, to get the free mobile data and other benefits, you will need to pay another Rs. 303 per month for the next 12 months to continue getting the data benefits. Prime members will also get media services free till March next year.
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He also added that just 170 days since its launch, Jio has crossed the 100 million customer mark on its 4G LTE network.
During the initial 170 days, Jio added 100 million subscribers, or 7 customers every second every day.
“With free voice and data and access to a whole host of internet communication, shopping and entertainment apps, Reliance Jio has fundamentally disrupted the Indian telecom sector”. Its free voice and cut-price data plans – that run through to the end of March 2017 – have forced rivals such as Bharti Airtel to respond with price cuts of their own.
Ambani also vowed to match the tariff data plans of its competitors with 20 per cent more data. He said Jio will cover 99 per cent of India’s population by being in every town and village of the country. This is only available to existing JIO users.
India, he said, has now become the No 1 global mobile data consumer in the world – ahead of the USA and China.
While this may be good for consumers, Jio’s aggressive pricing strategy has had an impact on other operators. For Jio, it’s equally important to maintain decent data speeds and calling experience to woo customers and retain existing subscribers beyond offering subsidised tariffs. He calls his first-100 million users “Jio ambassadors”, “co-founders of Jio movement”, and announced special benefits for them, in form of “Jio Prime memberships”. The announcement was made on Monday, stating that the collaboration between both the companies will bring benefits of Jio Digital Life ecosystem to their users. Users who have been enrolled before March 31st are only allowed to register for this at Jio’s official website or retail stores. That is effectively just Rs 10 per day.
“When we started Jio and we set a target for ourselves in terms of saying that we will acquire a 100 million customers in the shortest time”, he revealed recently.
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Not to confuse the readers, the Rs. 99 charge is the enrolment fee for a year.
