If you are desperate to get hold of Reliance Jio’s 4G Preview offer, it might do you some good to physically go to your nearby Reliance Digital stores.
According to our checks, some stores have started offering 4G preview invites this week.
“Our SM (store manager) got ten invites yesterday,” said a store employee, adding that they are willing to share invites to customers who want to buy the phone+SIM combo.
Not all employees have the ability to invite ten people to share the preview, and currently only senior level store staff, such as managers, have the power to invite people into the network.
If you find a willing store employee, you can leave your phone number, name and email ID with them, and you will get an invite in your email within 3-4 hours.
Once you get the invite, the store can upload your CAF (customer acquisition form) and your number will be activated in a matter of hours.
There are, however, reports of wrongly filled CAFs getting rejected. In many cases, therefore, wrong filling of CAFs has resulted in the loss of the invite code as well.
Uploading the CAF is the first step towards getting the 90-day preview offer.
Once the customer acquisition form is uploaded, the customer will get an SMS on his or her alternate mobile number saying “Dear customer, your order number xx with Reliance Jio has been successfully placed.”
After a few hours, the new SIM will start showing 4G signal, and at this point, he or she can make any outgoing call and it will be redirected to Reliance Jio’s verification department. This is followed by a confirmatory SMS, and then again by another SMS saying that the preview offer has been activated on your number.
There are, however, sporadic reports of delays in all these steps, especially in uploading the CAF and the appearance of the signal on the device.
According to sources, Jio is keen to get everything done according to process and this has resulted in extra-caution on the part of the employees.
Unlike what has been reported in most of the media, only senior segments of Jio’s employee base have got the invite emails so far. Assuming that there are only around a couple of thousand senior employees, only around 20,000 invites have been authorized so far.
Once the process is smoothened out, the operator could open the process out to more employees.
It is also likely that if the integration of RCom’s spectrum happens smoothly and process-related delays are ironed out, we could see a full-fledged launch as early as July.
Meanwhile, subscribers of Reliance Communications, the network partner of Jio’s, are also reportedly facing delays in upgrading their CDMA connections to 4G. Many have bought 4G SIMs and completed other formalities, but are still on the CDMA network.
