Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani yesterday announced free voice calling, with zero roaming charges and super-cheap data rates for Jio customers, where R-Jio will offer data services for free for four months.
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Reliance Chairman Mukesh Ambani told shareholders at the oil and gas giant’s annual shareholder meeting that Jio would be available for free until December 31 as it continues network tests.
Reliance, through its ads, dedicated the Jio 4G service to the Modi government’s flagship Digital India project.
Following this time, voice calls will remain free and data packs will be 5-10 times lower than the effective rate through rival plans now on the market.
Jio is targeting to add a million users a day reaching over 100 million users before December 31, 2016, garnering 10% of the over one billion mobile users in the country through its free offer. Reliance chief Mukesh Ambani, who launched Reliance Jio service on the company’s Annual General Meeting in Mumbai, said that the tariff was based on three factors: data must be affordable, pricing should be simple and the customer should pay for only voice or data. Additionally it would offer unlimited night time LTE data. The Reliance Jio is giving the rivals telcos a very stiff competition on the data and voice plans for Prepaid as well as for the postpaid users. With the Jio’s aggressive move, Bharati Airtel, Idea, Vodafone has cut down their tariffs plans to hold their customers.
Shares of Bharti Airtel, which fell by 1.35 per cent to Rs 306.50 in intra-day, later made a comeback and settled 2.66 per cent higher at Rs 318.95 on BSE.
“All over the world, operators charge for either data or voice”, Ambani said. While Airtel projects its share of data revenues will increase, Jio’s offer to give free voice calls has gotta hurt.
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CMR also expects Reliance Jio to become the largest Over-The-Top (OTT) player of the country and also make inroads in the elite league of largest app users of an Indian app developer. Jio is rolling out a unique pan India digital services business. 50 Rupees, or $0.75, per gigabyte of data.
