Reliance Jio has announced its revised tariff plans right in the midst of the festive season in India, with all the new rates going live from October 19 itself. Free calls and SMSes are still around, but there are several changes in store for subscribers, with many impacting them negatively.
For instance, the long-standing Rs 399 Jio prepaid plan now provides benefits only for 70 days and not 84 days like before. This means that people will get 70GB of 4G data instead of 84GB in all. The features of the Rs 399 scheme have now been integrated into a new Rs 459 pack, a 15% price difference.
Jio has also caused quite a bit of confusion with its Rs 309 plan. While the scheme isn’t visible on the brand’s website, it is available via the MyJio app. This could be a temporarily glitch or a genuine oversight on the company’s part. We won’t know for sure until the dust settles in the future. Moreover, the validity of the pack has been reduced from 56 to 49 days.
One shift which will hit users hard is that anyone who gets done with their daily quota will have to deal with 64kbps speeds in place of the 128kbps threshold the brand has maintained so far. The cheapest prepaid plan is a Rs 52 one which serves up 1.05GB of data for 7 days, capped at 150MB per day.
The most expensive Rs 4999 one grants customers 350GB of data with no daily limits. Its validity has increased from 180 days to 360 days, possibly because the Rs 9999 pack doesn’t exist anymore. On the postpaid side of things, Reliance is now asking for a security deposit that wasn’t a requirement before.
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Accordingly, the Rs 309 plan asks for Rs 400 as a security deposit and gives away 30GB of data limited to 1GB per day. The next Rs 409 one requires Rs 500 as a deposit and offers a lesser 20GB of data, but there aren’t any daily caps. The highest Rs 999 scheme demands Rs 1150 as a deposit and promises 60GB of data with no limits.
Surprisingly, all of Jio’s postpaid tariffs are only valid for 30 days now. It’s a big move away from the 3-month validity which the telecom operator had in place earlier. We’ll have to wait and see whether the company’s quick growth will maintain the same levels now that its plans have gone from a free for all to a more sober system.