Jio Users Can’t Access Old Prepaid Plans Any More

Reliance Jio has been disrupting the telecom industry in India since 2016. The telco's strategy forced its rivals to take similar steps, which led to massive losses. Three years on, Jio has reached a whopping subscriber base and has forced many incumbent players to quit the space leading to the Vodafone Idea merger.

Since its inception, Jio offered free voice calls irrespective of the network and it did so until recently. Last last year, Jio started charging 6 paise per minute for outgoing voice calls to numbers of other networks. Following the IUC fee, the telecom operator had to revise its tariff plans by increasing the cost of these plans by nearly 40%.

The telco did let users queue up soon-to-expire prepaid plans until December 6, which is when it came up with the new set of hiked tariff plans. Even after the price hike, there was a trick for existing users to recharge their old plans without any price hike with the help of the Tariff Protection service. Now, it stops offering old plans.

Jio Tariff Protection Service

The Jio Tariff Protection service is an exclusive collection of tariff plans meant for existing Jio users who are not subscribed to any active plans. These plans comprise the more affordable plans that were withdrawn in December 2019. Select Jio subscribers were able to recharge with these old plans, claims TelecomTalk.

In a recent move, the telecom operator withdrew these old plans from the MyJio app, thereby making these no longer available to anyone. Henceforth, all subscribers of the telco will be able to access only the new and more expensive tariff plans.

What We Think

Given that Jio subscribers do not have an option to recharge with the more affordable prepaid plans that were prevailing until December 2019, there are increased possibilities for many who want voice calling benefits to switch to other networks such as Vodafone and Airtel. The reason is that these telcos do not impose any IUC charges for outgoing calls to other networks.