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Rival Indian operators set for further woe as Mukesh Ambani says promotional prices will stay put for three additional months.
Reliance Jio Infocomm on Thursday extended its promotional offer of free mobile services for an extra three months, delivering a blow to rival Indian operators.
Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man and chairman of Jio’s parent company, Reliance Industries, said in a speech that the operator will launch a new promotion on 1 January 2017 called "Jio Happy New Year Offer". It is effectively a continuation of the Jio Welcome Offer, which launched in September and offered free voice, data, and messaging until 31 December 2016.
All new and existing customers will be eligible for the new promotion.
"On New Year’s Day, all Jio Welcome Offer users will be automatically signed up for the Jio Happy New Year Offer as well," Ambani explained. "All existing Jio customers will get the extended benefits of Jio Happy New Year Offer until 31 March 2017, on their current SIM card."
There is a slight catch, however: Jio is tweaking its fair usage policy (FUP) to 1 GB per day, to curb the excesses of its heaviest data users.
"80% of Jio users consume less than 1 GB of data daily," he said, adding that 1 GB per day is still 30 times greater than the average daily data usage on other networks.
"But, the other 20% of users consumer disproportionately higher amounts of data," he continued, which contributes to network congestion.
"So, in the Jio Happy New Year Offer, we have fine-tuned our fair usage policy to ensure that all users get a fair share of Jio’s network capacity," he said.
Once customers hit that 1 GB per day limit, their data speed will be limited to 128 Kbps.
The slight FUP adjustment will offer little comfort to Jio’s rivals, which have had to respond to Jio’s aggressive tactics by cutting their own prices while at the same time experiencing a huge spike in inbound voice traffic from Jio customers.
In November, Vodafone announced a €5 billion writedown in the value of its Indian operation due to intensifying competition.
Ambani said Jio now has 52 million subscribers, a remarkable feat given it has only been offering services to all-comers for three months.
"In the first three months since its birth, Jio has grown faster than Facebook, WhatsApp or Skype," he claimed. "Jio has become the fastest-growing technology company, not only in India, but in the history of the world."
