What is free and what is not free is a matter of debate: Sanjay Kapoor on Reliance Jio

In a chat with ET Now Sanjay Kapoor, Former CEO, Bharti Airtel spoke on the launch of Reliance Jio and the impact it will have on the Indian telecom industry

ET Now: The announcement is finally out the tariff plans are out too for the next three months it is going to be free service but voice will be free for life on the Rel Jio network my question to you really is, is that a fair assumption then to make that India will be a voice free market because incumbents will have to follow suit?

Sanjay Kapoor: Nobody was expecting an incrementalism in what was going to be announced today everybody knew it is going to be transformational and I think the attempt here has been to really change the rules of the games.

Now what is free and what is not free is a matter of debate. The issue is that simplicity has been brought into the way the tariffs will be defined in this country. The world over there are bucket plans everybody pays for a bucket and then there are no surprises, voices rolled into it, data has rolled into it, messaging is rolled into it and at places content has rolled into it. Now India has clearly moved towards that regime now instead of paying for voice we are going to be paying for data right.

We are also going to be moving from a calling party pays regime to both party pays because when you pay for data you pay both legs of incoming and outgoing but the fact is from a consumers perspective he is only going to be paying for data going forward.

The second thing that is going to be introduced in the tariff is the granularity, you remember when one second granularity came into picture actually the entire granularity factor of the industry got evaporated now when you pay for buckets the granularity factor comes back because everybody does not round it off to velocity and therefore there is some bit of granularity that sets in but the fact is that the entire announcement and the entire approach is game changing.

To a common man the voice is becoming free, to a common man the data is becoming cheaper, youth is the biggest consumer of data and there is something special with another 25% bonus thrown for the youth and the very fact that nobody has had.