MUMBAI: Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio on Thursday said it would extend the welcome offer for the Jio brand of services, including free voice calls and data services till March 31, 2017 through the ‘Jio Happy New Year’ offer. Industry watchers see this as a move aimed at doubling the number of Jio subscribers to more than 100 million from 52 million now.
“I want to announce today… that starting December 4, every new Jio user will get… Jio’s data, voice, video and the full bouquet of Jio applications and content, absolutely free, till March 31, 2017,” said Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani. Mr. Ambani was speaking at the Reliance Corporate Park (RCP) office addressing a gathering of more than 400 employees and business partners. Manoj Modi, his close confidant and son Akash Ambani were also present at the event.
Mr. Ambani also highlighted the fact that Jio had become the fastest-growing technology company globally. “In the first three months, Jio has grown faster than Facebook, WhatsApp or Skype (had, in that time). In 83 days, Jio has crossed 50 million customers on its 4G LTE ALL-IP wireless broadband network,” said Mr. Ambani adding that on average, a Jio customer used 25 times more data than the average Indian broadband user.
According to Mr. Ambani, Jio has signed-up more than 6 lakh customers every day for the past three months and has enabled SIM activation in less than 5 minutes per customer, across 2 lakh outlets. The company plans to double this reach to 4 lakh outlets by the end of March.
Talking about call drops, Mr. Ambani said, “In the last 3 months, nearly 900 crore voice calls from Jio customers to the networks of our three largest competitors were blocked.”
Mr. Ambani added, “Over the past months, the call block rates have come down from over 90 per cent to nearly 20 per cent as of yesterday (Wednesday). We are working with all our fellow operators to ensure that in the coming weeks, this will come below the specified grade of service, which is 0.2 per cent.” For enterprise and high-end customers, Reliance Jio has introduced home delivery of Jio Sims.
Mr. Ambani also said that the company had been facing issues with data speeds on its network as about 8 per cent of Jio towers have experienced congestion due to abnormally high data usage, leading to lower data speeds.
Signalling that there would be restrictions on data usage, Mr. Ambani said, “Eighty per cent of Jio users use less than 1 GB of data a day while the other 20 per cent consume disproportionately higher amounts, leading to the congestion. So, we have fine-tuned our Fair Usage Policy to ensure that all users get a fair share of Jio’s network capacity.”
Mr. Ambani also applauded the government’s decision to demonetise old currency notes, describing it as a bold decision. “By doing this, our Prime Minister has given the strongest possible push to the growth of a digitally-enabled, optimal-cash economy in India.”
PTI reports: “We will look into it, will come up with our response at appropriate time,” said TRAI Chairman on the Jio Happy New Year offer.
