Reliance Jio has formally listed India's net neutrality framework as a business risk in its Draft Red Herring Prospectus, warning that current rules could block it from charging premium prices for advanced 5G services. The disclosure puts a long-running regulatory debate at the centre of one of India's most anticipated public listings.

The DRHP states plainly that net neutrality restrictions "may limit a telecommunications operator's ability to offer innovative services and products, including the ability to offer differentiated or premium services for enterprise applications" and "could limit our revenue diversification and monetisation opportunities from advanced 5G capabilities." That is unusually direct language for a regulatory risk disclosure, and it signals that Jio sees the rules not as a settled constraint but as an active variable in its commercial strategy.

Why network slicing is the crux

The specific technology at stake is network slicing. It lets an operator divide one physical network into multiple virtual segments, each with guaranteed speed and reliability. A hospital system needing ultra-low latency, or an enterprise with high-bandwidth video demands, could pay for a dedicated slice rather than sharing capacity with ordinary users. Jio says it was the first Indian operator to launch a standalone 5G network, which is the architecture that makes dynamic slicing commercially viable.

The regulatory problem is that India's net neutrality rules were written to stop operators from favouring or blocking specific content or applications. They are less clear on whether charging users different prices for different quality tiers is permitted. That gap is the grey area Jio is pointing at. Jio president Udai Kumar Srivastava said at a TRAI event in February 2026 that service-based slicing already works within current rules, citing Jio's AirFiber Fixed Wireless Access product as a working example. "There is absolutely no clash," he said.

Jio has also pushed this argument through formal regulatory channels. In its submission on the International Mobile Telecommunications spectrum auction, it urged TRAI to take a "flexible approach" to net neutrality and cited two international precedents: the United States, where the Federal Communications Commission repealed its net neutrality rules in 2017 and a 2025 appeals court ruling has since blocked their revival, and the United Kingdom, where Ofcom's 2023 guidance allows premium-quality packages and specialised services, including enterprise network slices, subject to safeguards.

Airtel's Fast Lane has already forced the question

Jio is not the first to test this boundary. In May 2026, Airtel launched a product called Priority Postpaid, later renamed Fast Lane, which offers guaranteed 5G speeds in congested areas starting at Rs 449 per month. TRAI is now examining whether that plan breaches net neutrality. According to PTI, TRAI's preliminary assessment suggested the plan may not violate the rules, and the regulator has asked Airtel for technical and quality-of-service data to complete its review.

Critics of the Airtel plan argue it introduces user-based discrimination even if it avoids content-based discrimination. The concern is practical: in a market where the vast majority of mobile users are on prepaid plans, creating speed tiers based on what a user pays effectively divides the internet into fast lanes for the affluent and slower lanes for everyone else. Net neutrality rules in India were designed to prevent content owners from buying priority, but the question of whether users can pay for it sits in genuinely unsettled legal territory.

TRAI's eventual ruling on Airtel's Fast Lane will almost certainly define the boundaries for Jio's own ambitions. On Reliance Industries' April 2026 earnings call, Director of Strategy and Planning Anshuman Thakur acknowledged the dependency: "Our network is ready, but of course, we have to see if the market, the regulations, etc., are also ready for those."

For investors reading Jio's DRHP, the risk disclosure does two things at once. It flags a genuine regulatory uncertainty that could constrain a high-margin revenue stream. It also signals that Jio intends to pursue premium 5G monetisation aggressively once the regulatory path clears, making TRAI's position on slicing one of the more consequential telecom policy calls India faces in 2026. The outcome will shape not just Jio's post-IPO revenue model, but the commercial logic of 5G investment across the sector.