Is Reliance Jio giving away its Prime, subscription-only features for free?
Jio’s free days are over. After the order from TRAI, the Mukesh Ambani led company had to withdraw their Summer Surprise offer, under which the company said it would waive off monthly charges for its services for the next three months; but not before they let plenty of people subscribe to it. Even the last opportunity to register for Prime – a special offer for Rs 99/year that would provide them with cheaper data rates – is gone now.
But for some reason, people still are getting free data. Users who have neither taken Prime membership nor subscribed to any of Jio's membership plans, continue to get free services. While many of these users are getting similar service that they used to get earlier, some have now reported lower data speeds.
India Today spoke to a few Jio users who haven't subscribed to the Prime plan, and to their surprise found out that even after not opting for the Prime plan, some users are enjoying all the Jio services.
What is this glitch?
On Monday, April 10, Vodafone registered a complaint against Jio with the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), stating that Reliance Jio is violating TRAI’s norms by continuing to lure customers with the Summer Surprise offer.
"Reliance Jio is continuing with this offer held as not meeting regulatory norms, in the garb of configuration changes. For past three days, it has been promoting and luring customers to quickly recharge to avail the benefits of a non-compliant offer and also asking its retailers to communicate the same," Vodafone said in a letter to TRAI.
Post that, Jio had also said that to continue their services, users would have to subscribe to the Prime plan, failing to do so would result in their service getting disconnected.
According to India Today’s report, however, on May 2, weeks after Jio made the announcement, Jio SIM cards are still active and providing same sort of service they were offering earlier.
On its website, Jio mentions, "If you do not recharge by 15th April 2017, you will experience degradation and/or discontinuation of services from 16th April 2017."
The keyword here is “degradation”. While Jio may not have terminated the numbers that haven’t been recharged with Prime, they seem to have cut back on the services. The process of discontinuation is unlikely to happen all at once. Consequentially, a lot of users are experiencing a massive drop in data speeds.
"The data speed has gone down. I faced issues in even browsing, and even sending WhatsApp messages. It takes several minutes for the message to get delivered,” said one user. However, there seems to be lot of users still, who haven’t subscribed to Prime, but have not experienced any difference in data speeds of other services.
Fix needed
Of course, Jio needs to fix this glitch. It is after all, completely unfair to those who have paid for the Prime subscription. Which is why, Reliance Jio will soon discontinue the services for all the non-Prime members. While, at present there is no mention of when that will be, the company has mentioned a 90-day window.
In any case, non-Prime users need not even be concerned about paying Rs 99 more than Prime users. Thanks to Jio Money, they can avail that Rs 99 back through cash-backs. Jio gives a Rs 50 cashback on every recharge you do using your Jio Money.
So, if you pay for your Prime subscription (Rs 99) through Jio Money, you will get a cashback of Rs 50. Post that when you recharge your prime plan (Rs 303), using Jio Money of course, you will once again receive a Rs 50 cashback. In total, you receive Rs 100 cashback which covers your Rs 99 Prime membership fee.