Every good thing comes to an end – said the person dejected with abrupt discontinuation of the JioFiber preview offer.
He is as clueless as the thousands of other users who have been enjoying the free data party for over a year offered by Jio, one of the largest telecom companies in India.
Every month these people were entitled to over a terabyte of high-speed broadband data for free. Jio called this as the JioFiber preview offer and did not bill the customers for the data usage because the broadband had not been announced commercially yet.
However, the party is getting over for most of the JioFiber users and their internet pack is getting disabled asking them to pay for the services. There is a 7-day buffer period along with 50 GB of data being offered, in case you’re still doubtful and may want to switch your internet service provider.
Users are getting a message for this ‘grace period’ after the Jio preview plan expires.
During the annual general meeting held a couple of months back, the company announced the impending commercial launch and revealed the data plans.
Below are the JioFiber plans and pricing:
· Bronze Plan: Costs Rs 699/month and offers include 100GB data at 100Mbps speed. Includes free voice calls, set-top box and access to JioSaavn and JioCinema.
· Silver Plan: Costs Rs 849/month and offers include 200GB data at 100Mbps speed. Includes free voice calls, set-top box and access to OTT apps.
· Gold Plan: Costs Rs 1,299 /month and offers include 500GB data at 250Mbps speed. Includes free voice calls, set-top box and access to OTT apps.
· Diamond Plan: Costs Rs 2,499/month and offers include 1250GB data. Includes free voice calls, set-top box and access to OTT apps.
· Platinum plan: Costs Rs 3,999/month and offers 2500GB high-speed data. Includes free voice calls, set-top box and access to OTT apps.
· Titanium plan: Costs Rs 8,499 and offers 5000GB high-speed data at 1Gbps. Includes free voice calls, set-top box and access to OTT apps.
Apart from the above-mentioned benefits, each plan comes with free data for 6 months, with additional benefits for users who choose to pay for annual/biannual or quarterly plans. The prices mentioned above do not include GST.
Users were found complaining about various discrepancies in regard to the initial claim when the services were first announced. The set-top box is provided by the company is actually an Android streaming box and unlike your regular DTH set-top box, Jio’s box will run on the internet plan in your package.
You might end up using 100-150GB of data per month just for streaming your favourite TV shows and since you’re paying for data, the service is not free at all.
Talking about the TV channels on offer, Jio has not shared the official list of channels one can enjoy using this set-top box. We’ve reached out to Jio for clarification and are still waiting for a response from them.
In a piece of related news, Jio is reportedly capping the upload speeds to one-tenth of the download speeds in your plan. A few users took to Twitter to report that the upload speeds were reduced drastically without any communication.
In case you are on a 1Gbps plan then your upload speed would max out at 100 Mbps only and for people on 100 Mbps plan, the upload speeds would be approximately 9-10 Mbps only.
Almost all service providers offer similar upload and download speeds, however, Jio might heavily cap the upload speeds even though the data consumed for both way traffic is counted in your total data consumption.
With limitations in both overall data allocation and now with the capped upload speeds, users did not sound too happy and claimed that the commercial plans are totally opposite to what was promised initially by Jio.
