For the ninth month in a row this year, Vodafone Idea lost 4.6 million subscribers in the month of September. In the same period, Bharti Airtel gained 3.77 million new users. Reliance Jio gained 1.46 million, less than half of Airtel. This makes September the second month where Bharti Airtel has outpaced Jio in terms of additions.
In terms of additions month-on-month, Airtel grew by 1.17%, Jio by 0.36%, while Vodafone Idea was at -1.55%. Bharti Airtel had 326.61 million subscribers in September, Reliance Jio had 404.13 million subscribers and Vodafone Idea 295.50 million subscribers.
In terms of wireless subscribers, Reliance Jio holds the most market share at 35.19%, Bharti Airtel at 28.44%, Vodafone Idea at 25.73%, BSNL at 10.36%, MTNL at 0.29% and Reliance Communications at 0.001%.
In terms of active subscribers, Airtel had the highest number of active subscribers at 96.9% (316.49 million) of its total subscribers, followed by Vodafone Idea at 88.40% (261.23 million. Jio has 78.75% (318.28 million) active subscribers.
Requests to port numbers increased from 512.1 million in August to 520.8 million in September. In the zone for South and East India, the most requests to port numbers was from Karnataka at 45.35 million followed by Andhra Pradesh at 42.78 million.
Wireline subscribers increased from 19.89 million to 20.08 million. BSNL held the most market share in the wireline segment with 38.55%, followed by Bharti Airtel at 21.99%, MTNL at 15.10% and Reliance Jio at 10.35%.
In this segment, Jio got the most net additions with 3.03 lakh additions, Airtel had 66,335 additions and Vodafone Idea got 22,042 additions, whereas BSNL lost 1,82,549 subscribers.
Earlier in the week, Vodafone Idea became among the telecom companies to raise tariffs, as the company’s Average Revenue Per User still significantly lags behind Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio. It raised tariffs by 6-8%, and only hiked tariffs in select postpaid plans.