Thank You Reliance Jio for the freebies

Reliance Jio free service ends today. It has given millions of Indian free data & free calls for nearly 7 months. This is a unique kind of freebies in the whole world. And Jio reached 100 million subscriber in a record time of just 170 days. The extent of free data till Dec was 4 GB per day and after that it was 1 GB per day. These kind of data limits are unheard of. Even 99 % Indians don’t have a broadband plan at home whose data limit is 100 GB. The telecom market has changed forever in India. The era of 4G has truly arrived. All the incumbents have dramatically reduced the cost of data and they have started bundling voice with data. The average cost of 1 GB 4G/3G data till August last year was 250 rupees and now incumbents are giving free voice calls (with some limitation) and 28 GB data in just 350 rupees. Airtel is on buying spree and had purchased Videocon, Uninor and Tikkona. The mighty Vodafone & Idea have been forced into a merge to fight Jio’s onslaught. All the other smaller operators are running for the cover. Soon, India will have 4-5 mobile operators from a peak of 13 operators just 5-6 years ago.

I faced (and still facing) many qualities issue in Jio’s service. At places like in my office, there is virtually no network or internet. Earlier calling someone from Jio was a nightmare. You had to call 10-20 times to connect a call. But I must admit that it has improved. Millions of Indians learnt how to operate internet, Whatsapp, Facebook. The real revolution was in the field of video streaming. Even I was not streaming videos on my mobile data due to very high cost of data. Now almost everyone is watching you tube, hotstar etc. on their phones. I can say that Jio has brought video revolution in India. Soon the importance of TV may go down when everything is available on line. As a customer, I am not very much concerned about Airtel or Idea’s balance sheet. I am concerned more about my pocket. These companies have charged us very high data prices in the past. So, why should I shed tears for their high debt level?

And Jio Prime is icing on the cake. I had written on the same site that I would not continue using Jio after 31^st March. But I have subscribed for Jio Prime. Even though the data rates of incumbents have come down, the Jio Prime offer is irresistible. But our expectation from Jio will increase from tomorrow. Being a paying customer, I would expect a better call & data service from Jio. I dint care about Jio service till now because it was free but now I will be be hoping for better call quality & data speed. Also, I got 30 GB free data from Airtel (10 GB per month for 3 months). This is Airtel’s plan to stop post-paid customer like me from switching to Jio Prime. I think “Aache Din” has arrived for mobile users in India.