Reliance Jio adds 70 lakh users in September; Voda Idea, Airtel lose over 49 lakh subscribers

India's only profitable telecom operator Reliance Jio continued its dominance over its rivals, adding 69.83 lakh mobile subscribers in September this year to take its subscriber base to 35.52 crore. In contrast, Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel lost over 49 lakh users during the month under review, according to data released by sectoral regulator TRAI.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) data showed that Vodafone Idea, the country's largest telecom operator in terms of subscribers, lost 25.7 lakh subscribers during the month, bringing down its total user base to 37.24 crore.

Bharti Airtel also saw 23.8 lakh customers exiting its network, bringing down its total user base to 32.55 crore, TRAI data showed.

While state-run telecom operator MTNL lost 8,717 users to take its user base to 33.93 lakh, BSNL added 7.37 lakh users to increase its subscribers base to 11.69 crore.

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Meanwhile, total number of wireless subscribers (GSM, CDMA and LTE) rose to 117.37 crore at the end of September 2019 from 117.1 crore in the previous month, a monthly growth of 0.23 per cent. Wireless subscription in urban areas fell to 65.91 crore, while that in rural areas rose to 51.45 crore, TRAI data showed.

The overall wireless tele-density in India increased to 88.90 per cent in September from 88.77 per cent at the end of August. Delhi continued to hold the top position in terms of maximum tele-density with 242.13 per cent, while Bihar remained at bottom with minimum tele-density of 59.72 per cent.

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In September, a total of 53.9 lakh subscribers submitted their requests for Mobile Number Portability (MNP), a facility to switch from one telecom operator to another without changing mobile number. With this, the cumulative MNP requests increased to 45.76 crore at the end of September, since implementation of MNP.

As on September 30, 2019, the private access service providers owned 89.74 per cent market share of the wireless subscribers whereas state-run operators BSNL and MTNL had a market share of only 10.26 per cent.

Edited by Chitranjan Kumar