Reliance Jio to start charging from April

Subscriber base crosses 100-mn mark, says Mukesh Ambani

RELIANCE JIO, the telecom arm of Mukesh Ambani-run RIL, on Tuesday said it has decided to charge a tariff for its services from April 2017, but will offer sharp discounts for a year to those who sign up by the end of March.

In a speech broadcast live on Reliance Industries’ social media accounts, RIL chairman Ambani said the Jio unit already had 100 million subscribers and the network was expected to cover most of the country’s population by end 2017. While local voice calls, STD and roaming will continue to be free, Ambani promised to match the best offers of rival telecom companies and add 20 per cent more data from April 1.

For the existing 100-millionplus users, Ambani announced Jio Prime Membership programme wherein customers can enroll by paying one-time fee of Rs 99 and continue to get the existing benefits till March 2018 at “a rock-bottom introductory price of only Rs 303 per month”.

“For 170 days, Jio has added on average nearly 7 customers on its network every single second of every single day. This is an unprecedented level of acceptance for any technology company anywhere in the world,” he said. All domestic calls to any network including STD and roaming will continue to be free. For data, Jio will not only match the highest selling tariffs of each of the other leading Indian telecom operators but also provide 20 per cent more data in each of these plans, he said.

Jio’s entry had forced others to cut tariff and consider mergers to face competition from Jio. Vodafone and Idea are considering a merger to create a player bigger than the market leader, Bharti Airtel. Other telecom players also challenged Jio’s promotional scheme before telecom regulator Trai, saying free services beyond 90-days were a violation of rules.

“Jio launched its services on September 5 of last year. Today, just 170 days later, Jio has crossed the 100 million customer mark on its 4G LTE, all-ip wireless broadband network,” Ambani said.

Jio’s entry had forced other telcos to cut tariff and consider mergers