Not in Reliance’s DNA to bog down: Jio’s ‘three-month-free'data pack to continue

The telecom industry is seeing one of the biggest, baddest infighting over the Mukesh Ambani led Reliance Jio's trial offer. This trial test pack from Jio offers unlimited data services for free for three months to customers on their yet to be commercially launched 4G services. Jio’s extravagant trial offer did not go down well with the incumbent telecom operators like Airtel, Vodafone, Idea and they approached the top offices in the country including the PMO to stop Reliance Jio's trial testing immediately.

But a source in the company told Business Insider, “There is no reason to stop the three month free services for customers. The trial offer will continue as promised” the source said. Which is a relief for the customers as most of them had to purchase Jio’s Lyf mobile handsets in order to avail the particular offer. The company source also said “We will abide by what the TRAI or the govt instructs us but we are certain that TRAI will not stop the trail service as that will impact the consumers”.

This after a huge war of words between the existing telecom operators and Reliance Jio where telecom industry body COAI wrote to the Telecom Secretary, JS Deepak, "we request your (DoT) urgent intervention in this matter and instruct the said licensee to stop such practices. Further, they should be instructed to immediately disconnect all such connections provided to general public under the guise of test connections," COAI said. Reliance Jio did not take it lying down and called the allegations "malicious, unfounded, ill informed and frivolous" in an indirect response to the incumbent telecom players through a letter written to the telecom regulator Jio said, "steps taken by COAI in last few days by issuing press releases, alleging unfounded biases with the regulator and by writing letters against test trials are in fact attempts to sabotage the market entry of RJIL".

COAI pointed out that the elongated free trial testing is helping Jio poach customers, it said, "(Jio) has also tried to port subscribers from other operators, even though this is a prelaunch test period". Jio initially began testing its voice and data services with employees only scheme and now the company has over 1.5 million customers after they extended their free data trail offer to retail consumers. Reliance Jio's launch has been long awaited but Jio puts the onus for delay (of their commercial launch) on the incumbent players saying that the existing operators are not offering the requisite interconnection bandwidth and that incumbents are using their dominant position to stifle other operators.