Reliance Jio extends its 'Welcome offer' till March'17. What next?

Reliance Jio has changed the face of Indian telecom industry forever. Free voice and data are perhaps unprecedented in the history of world telecom sector. Apparently, it’s also the fastest growing technology company, not only in India, but in the history of the world, “in the three months, it's grown faster than Facebook, or WhatsApp, and the fastest growing LTE network," said Mukesh Ambani during a recent Jio event.

When Ambani officially launched Jio on September 5, he announced it with a ‘Welcome offer’ giving unlimited free voice calling and data up to 31st December. The move was indeed a masterstroke unleashing a price war amongst all the incumbent players.

Now that Jio’s welcome offer has been rechristened as “Happy New Year Offer” extending the freebies till march 31st next year, we look at what does all this mean for the telecom sector and also the consumers at large.

Notably and undoubtedly, this extension means that Jio will surely net 100 million users by March end. The company already claims to have on-boarded 52 million users by October end.

Secondly, this will also ensure a spate of allegations and arguments from the rival players terming the freebies as against guidelines that will finally land on the doorstep of telecom regulator TRAI.

Interestingly, this has already started. TRAI said on Thursday that it will examine Reliance Jio’s latest offer providing free 4G services for all its customers till March 31, 2017.

“We will look into it. Every tariff that is filed before us is examined. We will come up with our response at the appropriate time,” TRAI chairman R S Sharma told PTI when asked about the validity of Jio’s offer.

Apparently, the result of the former round coming out from TRAI office will decide on the future course of action for other telecom operators. If Reliance Jio wins this time too, actually it will be a win for every mobile phone user irrespective of which network he or she uses. Wondering how?

Basically, if Jio is offering discounts and freebies to its customers, so will other players to keep their users away from switching over. So, Airtel, Vodafone or any other network user need not fret, many more new offers are coming your way too. Keep checking this space for more updates.

Though customers might be elated with Jio, many other industries aren’t. Though we don’t have precise data for this but with free unlimited data 24*7, piracy and torrent traffic has increased exponentially. A Google search about Jio is more often than not linked to torrent speeds.

Ambani himself revealed that 80 percent of its current users consumed 1GB data per day while 20 percent consumed disproportionately higher amounts - which ended up congesting the network.

So looks like the torrent traffic will continue unabated for some more time and so will be piracy and who knows we might still get some more offer from Ambani.