India's Reliance Jio makes changes to its unlimited free use offer to appease rivals

Reliance Jio today announced some changes to its Jio Welcome Offer, which it had launched with the commencement of its commercial services last month. Under the offer, Jio offered all its services including 4G data, voice calls, text messages and streaming services for free to all subscribers till Dec. 31. 

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However, rival carriers alleged that the offer flouted existing laws. Now Jio has modified its Welcome Offer to comply with the laws and to appease its rivals. But if you are an existing Jio subscriber or become one by Dec. 3, you won't be affected. 

Here's what hasn't changed. Speaking to Mashable India, Reliance said it will continue to offer all its existing customers unlimited data (4GB of data on 4G network per day) through Dec. 31. The company added that any customer who becomes a Jio subscriber till Dec. 3 will also be able to avail all the aforementioned services till Dec. 31. 

People who get a Jio subscription after Dec. 3, however, won't be able to avail the free services till Dec. 31 and will have to choose from any offers that would prevail at the time. The company didn’t share what these new offers will be.

The changes come after incumbent operators expressed concerns to regulatory body, Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). The carriers pointed out that Reliance Jio was violating welcome schemes that under current rules cannot be offered for a duration that exceeds 90 days.

However, Jio's reading of the law seems that it can offer any promotional scheme to subscribers for 90 days after making the announcement. The validity of the scheme, itself, does not matter. Of course, rival operators who have had to either slash their 4G data rates or provide more data (in some cases double) at the same price, won't be pleased with Jio's interpretation.  

Reliance Jio was announced with much fanfare on Sept. 1 and the network went live for commercial operations on Sept. 5. The biggest departure from other carriers was the Jio promised to not charge users anything for voice calls forever and only charge for 4G data and its range of content services. 

To make things worse for existing carriers, Jio also announced a "Welcome Offer" that gave all its services for free to every subscriber till Dec. 31, no questions asked. The only caps it put into place was subscribers were capped to 4GB of data and 100 text messages a day. 

Naturally, incumbent carriers like Airtel, Vodafone, and Idea, who have over 400 million subscribers between them, aren't Jio's biggest fans.