After months of losing customers every month, Bharti Airtel added 32.6 lakh customers in July 2020. In June, the telecom operator had lost 11.3 lakh subscribers. According to data from Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), Reliance Jio added 35.5 lakh subscribers, while BSNL added 3.88 lakh. Vodafone Idea, on the other hand, lost a whopping 37.26 lakh subscribers.
This indicates that a number of Vodafone Idea subscribers moved to either Jio or Airtel, with July seeing 75.3 lakh requests for Mobile Number Portability.
In terms of market share, private telcos (Airtel, Jio and Vi) held a market share of 89.3%, while BSNL and MTNL together held 10.67% of the market. Jio continued to lead the market share in terms of wireless subscribers with 35.03% market share, while Bharti Airtel held 27.96% and Vodafone Idea held 26.34%.
The total number of subscribers as of July 2020 stood at 116 crore, out which 114.4 crore were wireless subscribers. Of this, 95.58 crore were active, with Airtel have the highest proportion of active subscribers (97%). Meanwhile, despite the highest subscriber base in the country, Jio only had 78.09% active subscribers in July.
Interestingly, TRAI data shows that Airtel and Jio have nearly the same number of active subscribers (around 30 crore).
Rural areas saw a higher increase in telephone subscriptions in July as well, compared to urban areas, with rural subscription increasing by 0.35% to 52.55 crore and urban telephone subscription increasing 0.26% to 63.84 crore.
For broadband, the number of subscribers increased 1.03% to 70.54 lakh compared to June, across 345 operators.
Among wired broadband service providers, BSNL had the highest number of subscribers at 78.6 lakh, followed by, Bharti Airtel (24.9 lakh), Atria Convergence Technologies (16.9 lakh), Reliance Jio Infocomm (11.6 lakh) and Hathway Cable & Datacom (10.1 million).
For wireless broadband, Jio led the subscriber base with over 40 crore subscribers, followed by Bharti Airtel (15.32 crore), Vodafone Idea (11.52 crore), BSNL (1.51 crore) and Tikona Infinet Ltd. (30 lakh).
This data shows that for both mobile and broadband connections, Reliance Jio has the highest market share with the highest number of subscribers.