Jio[1] started offering 28-day validity with the Rs. 98 pack for prepaid customers as part of its Republic Day 2018 Offer, making it the cheapest recharge with month-long validity it has to offer. To nobody's surprise, Airtel[2] has updated its Rs. 93 recharge to provide customers with validity of 28 days, as well as similar voice benefits. Both the plans by Jio and Airtel are aimed at customers whose calling requirements outweigh the data consumption considerably. This comes soon after Airtel started offering 1GB data per day for 28 days with the Rs. 149 recharge pack, as a response to Jio offering the same benefits at the time.
The Airtel Rs. 93 recharge gives customers 'unlimited' local and STD calls, free calls on roaming, 100 SMS messages per day, and 1GB of 4G/ 3G data for the entire 28-day validity period. The 'unlimited' calls are limited to 250 minutes per day and 1,000 minutes per week, same as other packs the telco offers; once the daily or weekly limits are exhausted customers will be charged at 10 paise per minute. Buyers can call a maximum of 100 unique numbers in a 7-day period, and if the number is exceeded, the call tariff will become 10 paise per minute for the remaining validity period.
The 28-day validity represents a substantial increase over the 10-day validity that the Airtel pack came with[3] till now. The rest of the details of the pack remain the same as before.
Airtel is matching the calling benefits Jio offers with its Rs. 93 pack, but falls short when it comes to bundled data. Since the Republic Day 2018 Offer went live[4], the Mukesh Ambani-promoted company is giving subscribers 2GB of...