Reliance Jio can offer Free Services beyond 31 March 2017, says Industry Experts

After announcing its new Jio ‘Happy New Year Offer’ Mukesh Ambani lead, Reliance Jio is facing competition from other telecom operators. A report claims that company can offer its free services to its customer after 31 March 2017 as well. This information released quoting various industry experts claiming that Jio will keep providing free services to its customer if other telecom operators like Airtel, Vodafone came up with aggressive plans. Recently, Airtel, Vodafone, BSNL and other operators released some cheaper plans offering free voice calls and internet data to their customers. These plans were issued by companies much after Jio announced its Happy New Year offer and extended its free services till 31 March 2017.

“Jio may decide to extend freebies by a couple of months beyond March 2017 if incumbent telcos get more aggressive on 4G pricing,” said Rajiv Sharma, telecom analyst at brokerage HSBC. Jio’s Welcome offer and recently released Happy New Year Offer comes with same advantages, but the company cut short the daily FUP limit from 4GB to 1GB.

Mukesh Ambani, Managing Director and Chairman of the Reliance Industries set a target of 100 million subscribers to achieve. The company will keep giving free services including data, voice & video calls, SMS and app bundle offers to its customers if it will not reach the target sooner or later. Meanwhile, other telecom operators also jumped in plans and pricing war with Jio and cut the prices of their existing plans.

The pricing war between these telecom companies is a win for customers as they will get cheaper plans. But industry experts from Religare expressed their shock on Bharti Airtel started offering affordable plans so early. Even Jio has not started charging their customers till now. It showed that Airtel’s customers are choosing Jio as a second SIM and opted out from Airtel services.

According to some reports, Jio claims it had hit nearly 60 million subscribers in only three months and adding more than six lacs customers on a daily basis. Now Jio is in the mood of extending free services even further which would adversely challenge other telcos on tight track than ever. “We expect a rapid shift of pure 2G voice users to the low-end 4G plans (offered by top incumbents), which may accelerate sector consolidation and data penetration,” HSBC’s Sharma said. The report also says that customers are rapidly moving towards free voice calls networks, which is forcing every telecom operator to give free voice call to their subscribers.

Right now, Airtel is still the number one telecom company in India. While Vodafone is number two. Both companies introduce free voice calling packs for their prepaid customers. Airtel launched two new packages at INR 144 and INR 344. The INR 144 pack comes with 300 MB data and local A2A free voice calls. While INR 344 package comes with 1GB free data and free voice calls to any network.

Vodafone also introduced the same kind of plans. Vodafone India Chief Commercial Officer Sandeep Kataria said in a statement, “We had recently made incoming free on national roaming across India. Our hundreds of million customers can remain confidently connected and enjoy talking to their loved ones worry free. Our 4G customers will further enjoy the additional benefit of up to free 1GB data along with unlimited calls,”
What do you thing about this telecom war, As a customer, you are a real beneficiary of this competition, tell us your thoughts about it in the comment section below and keep reading Phone Radar.