Reliance Jio May Extend Prime Subscription Deadline By One More Month; Not Enough Numbers Garnered?

As Reliance Jio’s Happy New Year Offer is about to complete by the end of this week, many subscribers are still addled whether to apply for the Jio prime membership. If you’re one of them, then you shouldn’t worry as Reliance is considering to extend its Jio Prime membership for another month.

As per TeleAnalysis, Jio is not happy with the number of subscribers who have applied for the Prime membership, as only about 22-27 million users have enrolled for prime membership out of 100 million user subscriber base. Whereas, Reliance had other expectations, as the company hasn’t even gained the 50% of their actual target. The OTT telco operator hasn’t revealed the official numbers on the difference of user database than the expected figure.

Why the sudden extension?

Interestingly, the consideration to increase the Jio Prime offers information spurred up after the Bank of America-Merrill Lynch survey which forecasted that nearly 85percent of existing Jio subscribers were willing to change to company’s Prime membership by April. To enrol for Prime, an existing subscriber has to pay a one-time fee of Rs 99, and then a monthly tariff of Rs 303. The main idea behind Prime subscription is to avail freebies through a daily Rs 10 plan.

Some of these benefits are free unlimited voice calls, SMS messages and free access to Jio’s suite of apps, also users can reap 4GB data which was later slashed to 1GB per day.

To subscribe to Jio Prime, users have to download my jio app on their respective Android or iOS smartphones to make payment, by logging on to Jio.com. While the other option is to directly head toward your nearest Reliance Digital or Digital Xpress Mini store where the subscription can be easily done.

If you’re not a Jio user and would want to know the best postpaid plans, here is our comparison list and here is the comparison of all the 4G prepaid plans from various operators

Other telco and TRAI

While Jio is working on its user base by foraying into other technologies and extending its offers, other Telco companies like Vodafone and Airtel are already finding ways to counter it.

The biggest and expected moves were the consolidations of Vodafone and Idea along with Airtel and Telenor. Vodafone and Idea merger attained a value of $23.2 billion (Rs 1.5 lakh crore) while creating India’s largest mobile telephony company with more than 395 million subscribers, 35 per cent of the market share, and 41 per cent of revenue shares.

Now, even if Reliance has expectations to gain a specific user base this might not be possible, as earlier TRAI had issued a clearance on the second promotional offer “Happy New Year” which was rolled out after “Welcome Offer”. The conflict in opinion came after Bharti Airtel had termed TRAI’s January 31, 2017, as “wholly illegal” and “palpably wrong”.

If Reliance is considering to extend the offer which would be the third official promotion offer then it seeks for a formal clarification from TRAI’s end, as to whether it will be applicable.

For now, the move looks to engross the attention of other OTT telecom operators, but can also increase the ambit of Reliance Jio Prime’s existing user base.