At the moment, the most trending topic in India is the telecom sector. With the entrance of Reliance Jio, the entire industry has witnessed some massive changes. The tariff plan prices went down within no time, and the Mukesh Ambani-led operator achieved 100 million subscribers in just 172 days.
Now the disruption with free services is finally gone, the telecom operator is going back to the past and introducing bundled smartphone data offers. Back in 2003, Reliance Industries disrupted the entire market by offering free incoming voice calls and subsidized mobile phones to attract the consumers.
But the scenario is a bit different today; Reliance Jio Infocomm is not subsidizing the mobile phones, but partnering the smartphone vendors to offer free data. Reliance Jio has collaborated with brands such as Gionee, Xiaomi, Asus, etc. and offering free data up to 100GB for the customers.
Then there's Bharti Airtel, who partnered with Micromax and rolled out an offer with the Canvas 2 smartphone. The collaboration was for one year under which the brand is offering 600 minutes of free off-net calls and 1GB data per day for one year.
On the flip side, Vodafone India partnered with Amazon India and offering up to 70GB free data with most of the smartphones available in the e-commerce portal. Besides Amazon India, the brand also joined hands with Nokia and offering free data up with Nokia 5, Nokia 6, and Nokia 3.
Idea Cellular, India's third largest telecom operator, has partnered with Chinese brand Vivo to offer free data for new subscribers. Having said that, all these alliances prove that the telecom operators are looking to retain the customers, and even looking to grab new consumers.
All in all, it's a win-win situation for both the telecom operators and smartphone brands. And there are some insane tariff plan deals available for new smartphone buyers, especially the 4G handset buyers.