Bharti Airtel records highest net wireless subscriber additions in October 2024, according to latest data Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) report. Airtel added 1.93 million mobile subscribers this month. According to a Trai report, while Reliance Jio added more active users than Bharti Airtel in October 2024, Airtel was the only grower in terms of total customer count, adding 1.92 million users.
Reliance Jio and Vi suffered heavy losses, losing 3.76 million users, shrinking their user bases to 460 million and 210.47 million respectively. Airtel’s subscriber base increased to 385.41 million in October. Analysts attributed Jio’s large total subscriber losses to the weeding out of some inactive, low-income 4G customers following the July rate hike. Jio’s customer base only consists of 4G and 5G users.
This shift affected market share: Jio fell to 39.99% (from 40.2%), Airtel rose to 33.5% (from 33.24%), and Vi fell to 18.30% (from 18.41%).
Due to the loss of Jio and Vi, India’s overall wireless telephony density dropped to 81.77% in October 2024, and the total number of mobile users fell by 3.31% to 1.15 billion.
In the landline segment, Jio consolidated its market leadership with 680,000 new subscribers, bringing the total number of subscribers to 15.68 million. Airtel added 220,000 subscribers to 9.54 million, while BSNL continued to lose subscribers, losing 35,954 subscribers to 6.09 million.
Finally, TRAI data showed that there were 13.45 million Mobile Number Portability (MNP) requests in October, taking the cumulative total to 1,052.56 million.
