Reliance Jio added 44.9 lakh customers in the month of June and strengthened its hold on the telecom sector, while Airtel and Vodafone Idea both lost customers — at 11.3 lakh and 48.2 lakh respectively. In June, all operators except Jio (which is India’s largest) lost subscribers.
It is possible that the subscriber loss came at a time that many feature phone users gave up their connection because they were not able to recharge their phones. Monthly decline rates of urban and rural mobile subscription were 0.18% and 0.40% respectively. The share of urban and rural mobile subscribers in total wireless user base was pegged at 54.3% and 45.7%, respectively at the end of June.
As things stood in June, Jio had a wireless customer base of 39.7 crore, Airtel at 31.6 crore and Vodafone at 30.5 crore.
Jio holds 34.82% market share, Airtel holds 27.76%, Vodafone Idea held 26.75%, BSNL 10.37%, MTNL 0.29% and Reliance Communications 0.002%.
In terms of increase of wireless subscribers, Kerala saw the most increase at 0.8% while Tamil Nadu saw the maximum decrease at -2.7%.
The total number of broadband subscribers in India rose from 683.7 million (68.3 crore) at the end of May to 698.23 million (69.8 crore) at the end of June, a growth rate of nearly 2%.
The top 5 service providers constituted 98.93% market share of the total broadband subscribers at the end of June, Trai said. These are Reliance Jio (57.05%), Airtel (21.67%), Vodafone Idea (16.68%), BSNL (3.29%) and Atria Convergence (0.24%).