Industrialist Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio on Thursday announced to extend the freebies including free voice call, and data services till March 31, 2017 through “Jio Happy New Year” offer, a move seen to rapidly double the Jio subscribers to over 100 million from 52 million now.

“I want to announce today... that starting 4th of December, 2016, every new Jio user will get... Jio's Data, Voice, Video and the full bouquet of Jio applications and content, absolutely free, till 31st March 2017. We are calling this the “JIO HAPPY NEW YEAR OFFER,” said Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani.

Jio has become the fastest growing technology company, not only in India, but in the history of the world, he claimed. “In the first 3 months since its birth, Jio has grown faster than Facebook, WhatsApp or Skype. 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 is using 25 times more data than the average Indian broadband user.





Jio has signed-up over six lakh customers every day for the past three months due to fast-track Aadhaar-based eKYC roll-out nationally that allowed SIM activation in less than five minutes.

Jio has successfully rolled out eKYC across two lakh outlets in India, equal to total number of ATMs and plans to double it to over four lakh by March 31, 2017.

Besides, activating Jio Sims, these outlets are equipped to provide customer service and Aadhar-based services because the digital infrastructure will have capability for supporting a variety of offerings into the future.

Mr. Ambani blamed the "anti-competitive" behaviour of his telecom competitors for call drops faced by Jio user. “In the last three months, nearly 900 crore voice calls from Jio customers to the networks of our three largest competitors were blocked. The benefits of Jio's superior voice technology have been denied to Indian customers due to such anti-competitive behaviour of incumbent operators,” he said.

Thanking the government and regulator for enforcing the license conditions, Mr. Ambani said, “While we have started getting Points of Interconnect, we continue to monitor this capacity so that the Jio voice calling experience remains superior. Over the past months, the call block rates have come down from over 90% to nearly 20% as of yesterday. 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%.”

For enterprise and high end customers, Reliance Jio has introduced home delivery of Jio Sims that can be activated in 5 minutes through eKYC using MyJio application available in top 100 cities by December 31, 2016.

Mr. Ambani accepted that the company faced a few issues with data speeds on its network as about 8% of Jio towers have experienced congestion due to abnormally high data usage, leading to lower data speeds.

“While 92% of our base stations, and customers, have been experiencing consistently high data speeds, we are not satisfied. We are working to de-congest these 8% towers, so that impacted customers go back to experiencing true-4G speeds. On the whole, Jio is not only delivering 4 times more data than all other Indian telecom operators combined, but also much faster throughputs than any other mobile network in India,” he said.

Signalling that there will be restrictions on data usage, Mr. Ambani said, “80% of Jio users use less than 1 GB of data a day while the other 20% of users consume disproportionately higher amounts of data, leading to the 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.”

A look at some of the announcements:

— Reliance Jio has grown faster than Facebook, Whatsapp in first 3 months, become fastest growing technology company.

— The company crossed 50 million customers in less than 90 days of launch.

— Get a Jio SIM home-delivered and activated in 5 minutes through eKYC.

— Jio now fully supports mobile number portability.

— Over the past months, the call block rate has come down from over 90% to nearly 20%, as of Wednesday.

— Jio has signed up over 6 lakh customers every single day for the past 3 months.

— From December 4, every new Jio user will get Jio’s data, voice, video and the full bouquet of Jio applications free till 31, March 2017.

— All existing customers will get extended benefits of Jio offer till 31 March 2017 on current SIMs.

— Millions of touch points for JioMoney will be deployed.. #casansaar (The Hindu)