Jio to revive 10-yr-old Prime membership: ₹300 fee, 1-year price guarantee, more benefits

Reliance Jio is set to relaunch its Prime membership programme, nearly a decade after it was first introduced, offering customers a one-year assurance against tariff or plan changes, reported PTI, citing people aware of the development.

The move comes within a week of rival Bharti Airtel discontinuing several lower-priced prepaid plans offering 1.5 GB of data per day, including the popular ₹299 plan.

Jio is also planning to enhance the benefits of its ₹299 prepaid plan, which offers 1.5 GB daily data, by bundling additional digital services, according to the report.

Under the proposed Jio Prime programme, existing prepaid and postpaid customers will be able to enrol for a joining fee of ₹300 and get a price guarantee for the following year.

Customers on other networks will be able to join the programme by porting their numbers to Jio or activating a new Jio connection, the report said.

"Jio Prime Membership Programme was originally created as an act of gratitude to Jio's first 100 million customers. It is reintroducing the programme to provide assurance of price guarantee and a range of additional benefits, for Jio's family of over 500 million users," a source said.

Jio reportedly plans to add a JioHotstar subscription, 5,000 GB of Google Cloud storage and access to Google's AI service Gemini Pro to the ₹299 plan.

Bharti Airtel last week discontinued its ₹299, ₹319, ₹579, ₹619 and ₹649 prepaid plans that offered 1.5 GB of daily data along with unlimited voice calls.

The reshuffle leaves Airtel's entry-level ₹199 and ₹219 plans unchanged.

However, subscribers seeking 1.5 GB of daily data under the discontinued ₹299 plan now have to move to the ₹349 pack, which amounts to a price increase of about 16%.

The ₹349 plan also offers unlimited 5G data.

The discontinued ₹299 plan offered 1.5 GB of daily data for 28 days, while the ₹319 plan offered the same benefits for 30 days.

The ₹579 plan came with 56 days' validity, while the ₹619 plan offered 60 days. The ₹649 plan offered 2 GB of daily data for 56 days.

The move is part of the company's efforts to drive sustained growth in average revenue per user (ARPU).

Airtel subscribers on lower-priced plans could often exhaust their daily data allowance and purchase top-ups or recharge again, while the ₹349 plan offers unlimited 5G data, they said.

Airtel's management had also indicated last week that the company sees room for raising tariffs on plans offering unlimited data at lower price points.

Bharti Airtel Executive Vice Chairman Gopal Vittal, during the company's earnings call, said the company's focus on tariff repair was more about changing the architecture of mobile plans than simply raising prices.

"For a very low level of pricing, you get unlimited data, and that means ARPU is capped," Vittal said. “That to me is not a healthy way to operate it because if you look at it, and we have talked about this before.”

He said mobile markets typically have small, medium, large and extra-large offerings and there was a need for a "sensible price architecture" in mobile services.

Airtel India's ARPU rose 5.6% to ₹264 in the April-June quarter, from ₹250 a year earlier, making it the highest among major telecom operators.