After losing mobile subscribers for the three consecutive months, Bharti Airtel added 1.9 million users in October. Reliance Jio, however, continued to witness subscriber loss for the fourth straight month, according to data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai).
Notably, Jio’s mobile subscriber market share fell below 40% in October.
During the month, Jio and Vodafone Idea lost 3.8 million users and 1.98 million users, respectively. Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL) added subscribers for fourth straight month. The state-owned firm added 501,994 users in October, the data showed.
For BSNL, subscriber addition came on the back of port-out from the private telecom operators after the recent tariff hikes. The company’s user addition, however, have slowed down compared to 849,206 users in September, 2.5 million users in August and 2.9 million users in July.
As of October end, Jio’s mobile user base was at 460 million users, for Airtel it was at 385.4 million users, and Vodafone Idea’s base was at 210.5 million users. BSNL had 92.4 million users during the same period.
Total mobile user base fell by 3.3 million to 1.15 billion as of October end. The loss in subscribers can be attributed to the increased SIM card consolidation. As a result, there has been a decline in the number of mobile SIM cards in the market.
Currently, Jio leads the mobile user market with a 39.9% share, followed by Bharti Airtel at 33.5%, Vodafone Idea at 18.3%, and BSNL at 8.05%.
In October, Trai received a total of 13.45 million requests for mobile number portability (MNP). “The cumulative MNP requests increased from 1.039 billion at the end of September to 1.052 billion at the end of October, since the implementation of MNP,” Trai said.
During the month of October, the total active user base across all telecom operators rose to 1.06 billion from 1.059 billion in September. Active users accounted for approximately 92.7% of the total wireless base of 1.15 billion at the end of October.
Jio’s active user base rose by 3.8 million to 448.3 million. Airtel added 2.7 million active users, taking its total active user base to 383.4 million, according to the data.
BSNL added 944,852 active subscribers, taking its active subscriber base to 55.6 million.
Vodafone Idea lost 723,554 active subscribers. The same reduced its total active user base to 178.8 million as of October end.
With regard to 4G/5G subscribers, the telecom operators lost 3.7 million users, taking overall base to 896 million as of October end.
