Mumbaikar Praveen Kashinath Jadhav left the Reliance Trends Digital store at Bandra disappointed after he found out he will not be able to get a connection soon.
To start with, the 39-year-old electrician did not have a 4G smartphone and then executives at the store told him that there was a waiting period of at least ten days. The heavy rush of people wanting to grab the freebies offered by the telecom company appears to have overwhelmed the operator.
“The calling and internet is free but it comes at other costs. It is no use for someone who doesn’t have a 4G compatible phone. How will a middle-class man afford a new phone when he has a functional one already?” Jadhav said as he walked out of the store.
Hamid, 32, who owns a small steel business has two 4G smart-phones, but he is also stymied by the SIM. “They say it will take 5-8 days. I will come back then,” he said.
Jadhav and Hamid are among the hundreds of customers who were turned away at Reliance retail outlets in many locations across major cities as the operator stopped accepting any more applications from consumers.
Token numbersInstead, users were either being given a token number for a future date or were told to call a particular number to know when they could come back for completing the KYC process.
Interestingly, at Reliance’s Colaba outlet, in south Mumbai, the phone number given to potential customers belongs to MTNL (22023306), which one could not get through even after trying for over four hours.
Those who were lucky enough to get a RJio connection are facing network issues, mostly due to lack of adequate interconnection with other operators. Subscribers complained of calls not going through, especially those made to users of other mobile operators.
Though RJio has been asking for more points of interconnection from Airtel, Vodafone and others, there has been no new inter-operator deals. “Interconnection is needed for seamless calls between two operators. The regulator must step in as it is impacting consumers,” said a Reliance executive.
Some consumers also complained of issues with porting their existing numbers.
But despite these challenges, users are still lining up. Aadil Siddhique and Faiyaz Khan, students at Mumbai’s Awami College, are thrilled by the fast Internet experience.
“We want to try it because the Internet works incredibly fast. But we’ll keep our existing connection and use Jio on a trial basis,” Khan said.