State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam (BSNL), which was seen gaining mobile users after tariff hikes by private telecom operators in July last year, has now started seeing subscribers loss, according to data by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai).
In November, the telecom operator lost 344,473 mobile users after continuously adding the subscribers for four straight months. BSNL, which was benefitting from its low tariffs, added close to 7 million mobile users from July to October period.
The company, however, started losing subscribers due to weak quality of services and absence of 4G services pan-India, analysts said. As of November end, BSNL’s subscribers were at 92.05 million.
Reliance Jio, which is the market leader, added 1.2 million users, bucking the trend of losing subscribers for the last four months, due to tariff hikes and impact of SIM card consolidation.
As of November end, the company’s mobile subscribers were at 461.2 million. Bharti Airtel lost 1.14 million users during the month, taking its subscriber base to 384.3 million.
Vodafone Idea continued its trend of subscribers loss. The company lost 1.5 million users during the month, taking its base to 208.9 million.
Overall, the mobile subscribers base fell by 1.76 million to 1.148 billion in November, according to Trai data. Jio’s market share was at 40.15%, Airtel was at 33.45%, followed by Vodafone Idea at 18.19% and BSNL at 8.03%.
According to data, active subscribers base accounted for 92.3% of the total wireless subscribers. The subscriber base fell by 6 million in November to 1.06 billion. Among the operators, Airtel’s subscribers base fell by 3 million to 380 million, whereas Jio’s active base fell by 1.12 million to 447 million.
Vodafone Idea’s active user base was at 176.9 million, down by 1.9 million during the month. Fixed wireless subscribers grew 574% in November to 5.16 million. Trai said, significant variation in the subscription count of wired broadband and fixed wireless is on account of shift in reporting of fixed wireless access (5G) subscription count from wireline segment to wireless segment.
» Read More
