With 370 Mn subscribers, Jio is top telecom operator in India

The Mukesh Ambani-led profitable telecom operator Reliance Jio is now the top operator in India by both subscriber base and revenue market share, showed a November 2019 report on India's telephone and wireless subscriber base by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India.

The thirty-eight months old telecom operator topped the list of wireless subscriber base with 32.04% market share, a significant rise from 30.79% in October.

The company added 5.6 million mobile subscribers in November, taking its total user base to 369.93 million.

Last year in August, the firm had become number one in terms of revenue market share with a 31.7% share of the adjusted gross revenue (AGR) that the industry recorded in the April-June period.

In Oct 2019, RIL's telecom arm reported a net profit rise of 45.4% to Rs 990 crore as against the corresponding period of the last year. It was the eighth straight profitable quarter for Jio. On January 17, Jio will post its revenue numbers for the third quarter of the current financial year. It is expected to see strong revenue growth.

In comparison, Vodafone-Idea, which followed Jio in users base, continued to witness subscriber shedding with a 29.12% subscribers market share and Bharti Airtel has slipped to the third position with 28.35%.

As the private access service providers held 89.51% market share of the wireless subscribers, the two PSU access service providers- BSNL and MTNL - witnessed a major downfall in their customer base with 10.49% and 0.29% market share respectively.

However, the number of telephone subscribers in India declined from 1,204.85 million at the end of October to 1,175.88 million in November along with the wireless teledensity plunging to 87.29% during the same time, added the report.

On net additions in wireless subscribers of access service providers, Jio again commanded the No. 1 position by adding 56.08 lakh subscribers followed by Airtel with 16.59 lakh subscribers in the month of November.

The other telecom service providers witnessed a reduction in their subscriber numbers. Vodafone lost ground sharply in most markets as around 3.64 crores of its subscribers switched to some other networks.

Besides, the report also highlighted the monthly growth rate of 2.67% in the number of broadband subscribers based on 340 operators in November.

The top five service providers including Jio (370.76 million), Airtel (139.92 million), and Vodafone (119.89 million) constituted 98.89% market share of the total broadband subscribers (661.27 million) at the end of November.

In July last year, Jio was found to be the fastest mobile network with an average download speed of 21 Mbps followed by Airtel with an average download speed of 8.8 Mbps, according to a data published by TRAI.

These past four years have seen a revolution in the way Indians used mobile data owing to the widespread deployment of 4G, which has also led to the reduced average cost to subscribers per GB data from Rs 289 in the year 2014 to Rs.11.77 in the year 2018.