Reliance Jio may announce an extension of its free services on Dhirubhai Ambani’s birthday

Reliance Jio started its journey on Dhirubhai Ambani’s birthday, 28th December last year when it opened its network for all of its employees. And there has never been a dull moment ever since including a massive war of words with the telecom operators to announcing free services through its ‘Welcome Offer’ for a year for all subscribers on the day of the commercial launch on 5th September 2016. Jio’s welcome offer was supposed to end on December 31, 2016.

We are hearing from sources that Reliance Jio has big plans to announce the extension of free services for another three months on the birthday of the founder of Reliance Industries and father of Mukesh Ambani, Dhirubhai Ambani. This announcement could mean that Jio subscribers can continue to use Jio services for free till March 2017 and the telecom operator can continue to add more subscribers with the extension of free services.

While it will be good news for the Jio customers but in the recent past, Jio subscribers have complained about the data speed deteriorating and calls failing. Reliance Jio has blamed the telecom operators for calls failing on Jio’s network, Jio has been in a major spat with telecom operators over the issue of ‘points of interconnection’ that essentially connects calls from one network to the other. Jio has complained about Airtel, Vodafone, Idea not complying with their licence agreement by not providing enough PoIs to Jio which is causing the huge amount of call failures on Jio network. As for the data speed it has seen a massive dip since the time of the commercial launch as the network has been loaded with a huge amount of subscribers hoping to use free services.

The telecom operators in the country already have an issue with the long running trial testing service of Jio, even the telecom regulator of India, TRAI has specified a limitation on the number of days a trial offer can be offered, which is 90days. While it will be difficult for Jio to continue to offer free services to consumers but Jio has also said in the past that it would not be fair to charge customer if the services are not up to the mark.