Is Reliance Jio’s voice calling absolutely free?

Reliance Jio took a major decision yesterday as it decided to offer lifetime voice calling services for free. The telecom service, which will be rolled out from Monday September 5, also announced the lowest data tariff currently in India.

Mukesh Ambani, Chairman of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL) during the Annual General Meeting said, “Customers should pay for only one service, voice or data not both. Worldwide operators charge only for data, and voice and messages are free. All voice calls for Jio customer will be absolutely free. The era of paying for voice calls is ending.”

However, Reliance Jio will provide voice calling through voice over LTE (VoLTE) which is based on the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) network system which will use data. As users are paying for data usage and voice calling will uses data, the question arises whether Reliance Jio is truly offering free voice calling services?

It is estimated that voice calling through VoLTE utilises 6KB per second, 360KB per minute and 5.4MB per 15 minutes, according to a Mikebeach.org report.

According to a Reliance Jio spokesperson, Reliance Jio will not be charging for the data used for calling. The only thing which will be taken into account by Reliance Jio is the data consumed by users through browsing or downloads.

The sources further said that there is a backend where the company segregates the data used for voice calling and downloads or browsing the internet. The voice calling data is waved off.

This is a similar practice which is used by telecom companies in the US to give free voice calling to users.