Jio persuades Telcos to pull up their socks

The long awaited Reliance Jio is set for a commercial launch in the coming months. The soon to be launched Jio has already threatened its telecom peers so much so that the operators have mulled ways out to withstand the severe competition.

Indian mobile operators' market as of April 2016




The stock of Bharti Airtel has witnessed consolidation since September 2015 with no trigger for the price breakout. Moreover, Idea Cellular too has seen lower tops and lower bottoms maintaining a downtrend since April 2015.

During the year Reliance Jio has moved towards completion of its network infrastructure and business services and plans. The company has also on-boarded over 1.5 million test users who have been using the services extensively. During the announcement of its annual report Reliance Industries had intimated about the launch of Jio at substantially lower rates than its peers.

To withstand the competition from Jio, Bharti Airtel has offered free unlimited voice calls at lower price points as a part of a two packs' package to refrain cream subscribers from transiting to Jio. Following in its footsteps, even Vodafone India is set to launch similar facilities shortly to match its peer Airtel. Another initiative taken by Vodafone is where it offers 10-minute free talk time to subscribers whose conversation gets interrupted due to the operator's mistake. Idea Cellular, the third largest telephone operator has cut its effective data rate by 67 per cent.