Reliance Jio beats Airtel & Vodafone, adds 84.45 lakh net subscribers

TRAI's report released on Friday reveals Reliance Jio was the sole telco to add 84.45 lakh net subscribers in August while competitors like Airtel and Vodafone were on the losing side. Reliance Jio added 84.45 lakh net subscribers in August. Other telcos including Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea came nowhere close to Jio. Meanwhile, the wireless subscriber base with 117.1 crore users accounted for more than 98 per cent total telephone users. 

"The number of telephone subscribers in India increased from 1,189.28 million at the end of July 2019 to 1,191.81 million at the end of August 2019," Trai said in telecom subscription report for the month of August 2019. "Total wireless subscribers (GSM, CDMA and LTE) increased from 1,168.31 million at the end of July 2019 to 1,171 million at the end of August 2019," the report said.

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Jio added 84.45 lakh customers

On the other hand, Vodafone Idea added 49.56 lakh customers, followed by Bharti Airtel with 5.61 lakh mobile subscribers, BSNL with 2.36 lakh, MTNL with 6,701 and Reliance Communications with only 63 users. 

As per the TRAI report, the state-owned telecom operation BSNL was the only operator gaining customers along with Jio since October 2018. However, BSNL lost the steam in August 2019 with a dip in the number of subscribers. During the reported month 48.6 lakh customers ported out their number.

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What's more, the wireline subscriber base declined by 1.5 lakh to 2.08 crore with BSNL alone losing 1.41 lakh fixed-line customers. Private telecom operators Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel posted growth in their fixed-line connection base. India's broadband subscriber base grew by 1.87 per cent to 61.55 crore connections with wireless connections accounting for around 97 per cent of the total base.

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"Top five service providers constituted 98.96 per cent market share of the total broadband subscribers at the end of August 2019. These service providers were Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd (34.82 crore), Bharti Airtel (12.67 crores), Vodafone Idea (11.11 crore), BSNL (2.15 crore) and Atria Convergence (14.7 lakh)," the report said.

(With PTI inputs)