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Disruptive newcomer offers a year of unlimited voice, text, data for one-off charge of INR99 plus INR303 per month.
India’s Reliance Jio Infocomm introduced its first price plans on Tuesday, and they did nothing to ease the pressure on its rivals.
The operator has shaken up the market by providing free voice, messaging and data since September; it will continue to offer services at no charge until the end of March.
From the beginning of April, existing customers, plus customers who join before 31 March, are eligible for Jio’s new ‘Jio Prime Membership Programme’, which offers unlimited services until the end of March 2018 for a one-off enrolment fee of 99 rupees (€1.40) plus INR303 per month (€4.29) thereafter.
Jio also launched its ‘Everyday More Value Offer’, under which customers can pick the best-selling tariff from any rival operator, and Jio will match the price but offer 20% more data.
"Jio is instituting a comprehensive process of monitoring all publicly announced plans from other operators across the country on a regular basis to enable this. With this, Jio will ensure that consumers do not have to ever suffer from ‘data anxiety’ and remain assured of the best value for the price paid," said a statement from Jio.
In addition to new price plans, Jio revealed that its customer base has topped 100 million.
According to figures published late last week by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), that makes Jio the country’s fourth-largest operator by subscribers, ahead of state-owned BSNL, which had 96.79 million subscribers at the end of December 2016, and behind Idea Cellular, which had 190.52 million.
Jio also said that its mobile network now carries 1 exabyte, or 1 billion gigabytes, of data per month, and 2 billion minutes of voice and video traffic per day, making it the world’s busiest network in terms of data carried.
"Jio users are today consuming nearly as much data as the USA and 50% more data than China in a clear indication that India can and will adopt digitisation and Digital Life faster than anyone else in the world," Jio declared.
