Reliance Jio 4G officially launched in India, with free voice calls and low-cost data plans

During the Annual General Meeting in Mumbai earlier today, Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, officially launched the company’s Jio 4G services. Reliance is looking to disrupt the Indian telecom market with their services in a big way, and there is certainly a lot that will be very exciting for Indian consumers.

The most noteworthy part of the announcement was the fact that Reliance will not have any charges at all for voice calls, and national roaming is entirely free as well. Further, with the exception of the cheapest plan, which has a limit of a 100 messages, there will be no charges for SMS either.

Customers should only have to pay for one service, voice or data, not both. – Mukesh Ambani

The data plans are impressively cheap as well, starting at Rs 149 (~$2.25), which gets you 300 MB of data per month. However, users will be more interested in the next tier plans, priced at Rs 499 (~$7.45) and Rs 999 (~$14.92) respectively, that will include 4 GB and 10 GB of 4G data respectively. That is almost double the data that you’d get at that price from competing network carriers, but that’s not all there is to it.

Except for the cheapest package, all other data plans also include free 4G data at night, so the data limits are applicable for what you use during the day. There are seven such data packages available, going all the way up to 75 GB of data, priced at Rs 4999 (~$74.66).

If you are looking for a home internet solution, the JioNet Hotspot service is available at the same price points, but with double the data. So Rs 499 will get you 8 GB of data, going all the way up to 150 GB of data for Rs 4,999. There is no free data at night though. To get this service, you will also have to pick up the JioFi Hotspot device, priced at Rs 1,999 (~$29.85).

All data plans also include free access Jio apps and subscriptions worth Rs 1,250 (~$18.67). This includes Jio TV, that will offer access to over 300 channels, Jio Cinema, that boasts a library of over 6000 movies and a million TV show episodes, as well as Jio Music, which is home to over 10 million songs.

Reliance Jio has already had the big network carriers worried with their Preview offers, and now, they are certainly going to be scrambling to compete. The next few months are going to be very interesting in the Indian telecom market, and we can’t wait to see what the fallout of the launch of Jio is going to be.

Anyone will be able to pick up a Reliance Jio SIM card from September 5, and the great news is that till December 31, all services, including data, will be completely free, after which, you will have to choose the data package that best suits your needs.

What do you think of the data packages that Reliance Jio has on offer? Let us know in the comments section below!