Reliance Jio Free Usage Offer for New and Existing Customers Extended Till March 31

At an event on Thursday, Reliance Industries Chairman Mukesh Ambani made a number of announcements about Reliance Jio, and said that the company will extend its free services by another three months.

"Starting December 4, 2016, every new Jio user will get the data, voice, and a full bouquet of the Jio apps free till 31 March 2017," Ambani said. "This is the Jio Happy New Year Offer. All our existing 52 million users will continue to enjoy the Welcome Offer till 31 December, and then automatically be signed up for the New Year Offer. No need to buy a new SIM."

Currently, data is capped at 4GB per day under Welcome offer after 1st January data will be capped at 1GB per day, after that speed will be reduced to 128kbps. The company says that only 20% of Jio users use over 1GB of data per day. It also said that this is 30 times the use on other networks.

Ambani addressed this and said that the reason was the free Welcome Offer. "With 52 million customers, taking full advantage of the free Welcome Offer, it has caused slowdowns, but only on 8 percent of our towers," he said. "And 92 percent of our customers and towers have been experiencing high data speeds."

At the announcement, Ambani also confirmed that Jio has signed up 6 lakh customers every day for three months, thanks to eKYC, and said, "On average, a Jio customer is using 25 times the data that an average broadband user consumes." In the three months since the launch, it has seen millions of Indians signing up, and Ambani added that he hopes millions more will join soon. He added that there are 2 lakh eKYC outlets - "nearly equal to the total number of ATMs in India," Ambani pointed out - and that there will be 4 lakh outlets by March 2017.

"We are the fastest growing technology company, not only in India, but in the history of the world," said Ambani, adding, "in the three months, it's grown faster than Facebook, or WhatsApp, and the fastest growing LTE network."

He also said that in the last 3 months, nearly 900 crore voice calls from Jio to the networks of its 3 largest competitors were blocked due to the anti-competitive behaviour of these incumbent operators. Over the past months, the call block rate has come down from over 90% to nearly 20% as of yesterday.