This Is How Airtel Can Turn The RJio Challenge To Its Advantage

A new chapter begins in the story of Indian telecommunications industry with the launch of Reliance Jio’s 4G services earlier this month.

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In a highly disruptive move, Jio launched services by announcing one of the cheapest data plan in the world and free-voice-for-life service to its subscribers. As if this wasn’t enough the company would be offering free voice, data and messaging service till the end of the current calendar year, to encourage subscribers from rival telcos to change their telecom service provider.

With around 80% of the telco’s revenue coming from voice, the move is bound to impact all the service providers.

Though Airtel was the first one to launch 4G services in the country, it started aggressively pushing them only last year. The with 3G and 4G being launched at almost the same time, it was not surprising that the company focused more on 3G than on 4G network. Besides the ecosystem for the latter was hardly developed. With the launch of Jio’s network, the operator is on backfoot and needs to come up an aggressive strategy to prevent its subscribers to move its network.

As the country’s largest telecom service provider (by revenue and subscriber base), Airtel is not to be taken lightly. Airtel has over 250 million customers across India and Jio has between 1.5 and two million. To begin with it has been offering a gamut of services to its subscribers and has huge and priceless insights in their consumption patterns. This can be a minefield in coming up with targeted tariff plans depending on their usage. This subscriber data is what sets the incumbents apart from any new entrant and it is up to the telcos to use it to their maximum benefit. In comparison, Jio is a Greenfield operator and will take some time to learn about the likes and dislikes of its subscribers.