Airtel has finally announced its own tariff plan offering 84GB data for 84GB days at Rs 399. The new tariff plan is an effort to counter Reliance Jio's updated data plan announced last month. Airtel's new plan is only available to company's prepaid subscribers using 4G SIM cards and users cannot club it with any other existing plans.
Under company's new Rs 399 plan, Airtel prepaid subscribers get unlimited local and STD calls and 84GB data with a fair usage policy of 1GB per day. However, the unlimited calling plan is restricted to 1,000 minutes of local or STD calls on mobile or landline per week. Post consumption of 1,000 minutes, Airtel prepaid customers will be charged at 10 paise per minute for on-net calls and 30 paise per minute on other networks.
With its new plan, Airtel is trying to counter Reliance Jio's recently introduced Rs 399 plan that allows its Prime members to continue the benefits of Dhan Dhana Dhan plan for another 84 days. Vodafone has also tried to counter Jio with its Rs 445 recharge plan for students, which comes with 84 days of validity and offers a discount on Ola and Zomato. The company also has a Rs 244 prepaid plan offering 70GB 4G data for 70 days.
Since its launch in September last year, Reliance Jio has forced the incumbent telecom operators to lower their tariff plans and offer unlimited voice calling as a standard option. The company recently added two new tariff plans priced at Rs 349 and Rs 399 offering a validity of 56 and 84 days. With Rs 349 recharge, Jio prime members get 20GB unlimited data with no cap on data consumption while Rs 399 data plan offers benefits similar to Dhan Dhana Dhan offer.
Reliance Jio claims to have over 100 million paid subscribers and it still offers the most competitive tariff plan among all its peers. As one recent report suggested Jio is still not the primary SIM for most users and becoming primary service provider continues to be its biggest struggle.