Reliance Jio's free welcome offer estimated to continue until March 2017

It now seems that Reliance Jio's popular free 4G plan will continue to be offered even after the December 31 cut-off date. Though not publicly announced by Reliance Jio, analysts estimate that the 4G services would continue for an extended period of time.

Reliance Jio would consider extending the free 4G offer until at least March 2017 in a bid to attract more users, according to a LiveMint report that quotes analysts at Motilal Oswal. "Mass scale free welcome offer could continue until March 2017 to attract subscriber growth towards the celebrated 100 million mark," it said.

However, during this extended period of time (after December 31), 4G data is expected to come with prices lying between Rs 130 and Rs 140 per GB of 4G-LTE data. As always, voice calls would be free of cost, without national roaming penalties being imposed.

Also, as per estimates by analysts at Citi Research, who officially quote top management officials at Reliance Industries, there would be no cap with regard to the count of promotional offers rolled out. Hence, Reliance Jio is expected to leverage this opportunity to the maximum. This potential development also points at an extension of the Jio 4G freebies beyond December 31.

Nonetheless, current Reliance Jio subscribers who are using the Jio SIM-card are experiencing more call drops, especially when calls are made to numbers offered by an incumbent service provider like Bharti Airtel or Idea Cellular. Despite this, Reliance Jio has stated that it continues to add nearly 1 million customers per day after its free 4G Welcome Offer was rolled out on September 5 this year.

"We are adding a low of 0.6 million and a high of 1.1 million customers a day," Anshumann Thakur, Reliance Jio's strategic head, said during the company's recent second-quarter earnings call.

Reliance Jio had earlier stated that its free 4G Jio Welcome Offer would be limited until December 3 to new subscribers. Existing customers can continue using the free Jio Welcome Offer until the 31st of the month.