Reliance Jio Gains More Subscribers As Vi Lags Behind, Airtel At Second Position, TRAI Reports (image: Pixabay)
The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), in its recent report said that among the Indian Telecom market players, Reliance Jio has kept up its strengthened position by gaining a record of 3.9 million new users in the month of July. Vodafone Idea (Vi), on the other hand, saw a contract of user base by 1.2 million during the same period. The rise of Jio can be seen attributed to a strong hold in rural grounds and also at the expense of Vi’s loosing base, the ET reported.
As per the TRAI report, “top five service providers constituted 98.37% market share of the total broadband subscribers at the end of July-23. These service providers were Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd 451.89 million, Bharti Airtel 251.12 million, Vodafone Idea 124.28 million, BSNL 24.55 million and Atria Convergence 2.18 million.”
The TRAI data, on Mobile Number Portability, showed that 11.7 million subscribers had submitted requests for porting their mobile numbers. This pointed to a continued drift of subscribers migrating from Vi to other operators. For the last 18 months, Vi has been facing a loss of subscriber base which has gone up in recent times, the Business Standard said. The loss of customer base of Vi leads to a combination of factors which features liquidity issues and long pending fundraising that has not enabled its network expansion and also a delayed 5G entry, said the ET.
Reliance Jio, the TRAI data said has been counting more subscribers, showing a robust growth in this, with an addition of 2.2 million subscribers in June. Among India’s 30.6 million landline user market, one in of every three connections is that of Jio. The company has crossed the 10 million line of landline connections in the month of July. In June, the number was 9.95 million users.
Bharti Airtel, which holds the second place after Jio, has its subscriber base increased, but at a modest pace. The telecom company had an addition of 1.5 million subscribers in July which was a slight rise from the 1.4 million in June.
In the month of July, Jio’s share of subscribers in the market was 38.6 percent, Airtel’s stood at 32.7 percent and Vi’s reported a19.9 percent which marked a dip below 20 percent. Looking at the state owned BSNL and MTNL telecom operators, they lost 1.4 million and 33,623 wireless customers each.
As for the total number of mobile phone connections in India, an increase of 2.67 million was registered in July, which has been counted as a considerable increase from the 0.37 million in the month of June.
