The data tariff war has officially begun. In a landmark announcement, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries (RIL), Mukesh Ambani announced that customers on their telecom network Reliance Jio would have unlimited free voice calling. This will also extend to national roaming. Apart form this, Jio will provide a ‘welcome offer’ with free unlimited access to data and voice calls for those customers who haven’t still tried out the network; however Ambani did not mention whether this is available via free SIM cards or through bundled offers while purchasing smartphones. This welcome offer starts from September 5th to December 31st. Note that Jio's test network is already present in 18,000 cities and towns, and over 2 lakh villages. Voice calls in India: 1997: Rs 32/min 2016: Free — Mahendra Palsule (@ScepticGeek) September 1, 2016 Customers will be charged Rs 50 per GB of data on their telecom network Jio. This translates to 5 paise per MB. He announced tariffs starting from Rs 149 for 0.3 GB of data with validity of 28 days. The whole plans from Jio are shown here below: In contrast, Airtel, India's largest telecom operator, introduced two 3G/4G recharge packs worth Rs 748 and Rs 1498 which offer 1GB data valid for 28 days. After this data limit has been reached, Airtel has 2 more packs priced at Rs 51 and Rs 99 for 1GB 3G/4G data without an expiry date, which can be “topped up” of sorts to the previous data pack. Idea offers 3G data recharges…
