Jio, Airtel add nearly equal mobile subscribers in September

New Delhi: Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel onboarded almost a similar number of mobile subscribers in September, with Jio gaining 2.71 million users and Airtel adding 2.69 million, showed data released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) Tuesday.

State-run Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) added 625,633 subscribers during the month, ahead of Vodafone Idea’s (Vi) 550,119 users.

India’s wireless mobile subscriber base increased by 6.57 million to breach the 1.3 billion barrier at the end of September, from 1.293 billion in August, registering monthly growth of 0.51%, the data showed. The figures include machine-to-machine (M2M) cellular connections.


Jio’s mobile subscriber base rose to 511.14 million from 508.43 million in August, while Airtel’s increased to 494.29 million from 491.60 million. Vi’s base crossed the 200 million mark, growing to 200.12 million from 199.57 million, while BSNL’s rose to 94.30 million from 93.67 million.

Jio remained India’s largest mobile operator, with a 39.32% subscriber market share at the end of September, followed by Airtel at 38.02%. Vi held 15.39% and BSNL accounted for 7.26%, according to TRAI.

In percentage terms, BSNL recorded the fastest monthly growth among the four major operators at 0.67%, followed by Airtel at 0.55%, Jio at 0.53% and Vi at 0.28%.

India’s total telephone subscriber base, including wireline connections, increased by 7.23 million to nearly 1.368 billion in September.

The fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband subscriber base increased 1.95% sequentially to 19.18 million. Jio dominated the FWA market with a combined 15.1 million subscribers at the end of September, against Airtel’s 4.08 million. Jio ended the month with 78.7% of India’s FWA user base, compared to Airtel’s 21.3%.