Trai, Telecom News, ET Telecom

Kolkata: Reliance Jio consolidated its leadership in rural India, adding 3.48 million users in those markets in July, while Vodafone Idea (Vi) and Bharti Airtel lost 0.99 million and 0.41 million customers respectively in these geographies, according to latest subscriber data issued by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Thursday.

Overall too, Jio gained 6.51 million wireless customers in July, taking its gross user base to 443.21 million while Airtel’s rose 1.94 million to 354.05 million. Vi, by contrast, once more lost 1.43 million customers, shrinking its total mobile user base to 271.9 million, indicating its continuing inability to compete effectively with stronger rivals, Jio and Airtel.

Jio’s decent rural show was driven by strong rural consumer appetite for its cheaper offers on its 4G feature phone, JioPhone, that its older rivals couldn’t immediately match, said analysts.

Jio’s rural mobile user base swelled to 190 million in July, while Vi and Airtel’s fell to 138.61 million and 171.31 million respectively.

Jio’s strong customer expansion in rural markets, in fact, led to 0.41% growth in overall rural mobile user base to 536.74 million in July, reversing the marginal fall in June. The urban mobile user base too has risen 0.59% to 650.10 million as migrants largely rejoined work in cities with easing of lockdown curbs.

Analysts said Jio’s strong user expansion in rural markets also suggested that its wireless business wasn’t impacted by the Covid lockdowns.

Visitor Location Register (VLR), a key metric reflecting the number of active subscribers on a mobile network, showed that 97.74% of the users were active for Bharti Airtel, 87.67% for Vi and 78.18% for Jio.

Trai data also showed Jio and Airtel have widened customer market shares to 37.34% (36.98%) and 29.83% (29.82%) respectively, while Vi’s narrowed further to 22.91% (23.15%) over the previous month respectively.

Data collated by the telecom regulator showed India’s mobile user base rose by 6.01 million to over 1.186 billion in July 2021.