Reliance Jio officially revealed its Jio Prime membership plans yesterday. With some of these new plans, users can continue to enjoy unlimited voice and 4G data on their Jio numbers. The new Jio Prime membership plan will cost users a one-time fee of Rs. 99 for enrollment, after which they can choose from a range of monthly plans starting at Rs. 49. We detail all these all these Jio Prime membership plans here.
While a lot of you might be looking to avail Jio’s attractive Prime Membership plans, and some of you might even be looking to switch from your Airtel/Vodafone/Idea networks to Jio, there are a few things you should consider before doing so.
1) If you are planning to subscribe to any of the Jio Prime postpaid plans, you are required to opt in for autopay of your bills. This means that you will have to setup a monthly payment method such as credit/debit card or direct deduction from your bank account, from which Jio will automatically debit your bill amount at the end of your monthly cycle. Members will also not have the facility to get printed bills, which will only be sent as e-bills.
2) Those looking to use their Reliance Jio Prime memberships for telemarketing or any other commercial purposes, just because voice calls on the network are free, can forget about doing so. Jio states that any such misuse of its services will result in discontinuation of services, as the network is only meant for personal use.
3) Any outgoing calls/SMSs to premium numbers, IN numbers and other chargeable short codes will not be free and charges will apply
4) The unlimited free SMSs on Jio Prime membership plans are capped to 100 SMSs in compliance with TRAI rules. Users will be charged beyond this limit.
5) Weirdly, while Reliance Jio Prime members can use their devices to hotspot or tether, they are only allowed to connect up to 1 device at a time through the feature. This restriction is not there on Airtel, Vodafone or Idea users.
6) While subscription to the suite of Jio apps is free with all the Jio Prime plans, users will be charged for data used by these apps.
Besides the fine print above, those looking to move to Reliance Jio Prime should also keep in mind that the telco is currently fighting incumbent operators on connectivity issues. While it’s easy to make Jio-to-Jio calls, Jio-Airtel, Jio-Vodafone, Jio-Idea calls are still witnessing a high call failure, drop rate. In a recent press statement, Jio noted, “2.6 crore NLD calls are still failing daily amounting to 53.4% call failure (as on 31-Jan-2017) as against TRAI norm of 0.5%.”