Telcos pitch it up for extra swing this IPL; Airtel not in the race yet with Jio, Vi

Telecom companies have taken their battle for subscribers to the IPL pitch, making the ongoing season of the country’s biggest sporting spectacle an arena to woo new customers with lucrative offers.

Reliance Jio has rolled out a free 90-day JioHotstar subscription and a complimentary 50-day AirFiber home broadband connection for users purchasing a new Jio SIM. Vodafone Idea (Vi), which recently launched its 5G services, has bundled free JioHotstar subscriptions with all its unlimited prepaid and postpaid plans.

Bharti Airtel, the country’s second-largest telco, has yet to announce any IPL-specific offers this year.


Analysts said sporting events like the Indian Premier League (IPL) provide telcos with a good opportunity to migrate subscribers to 5G and broadband use even as their immediate impact on the average revenue per user (ARPU) is limited. Once acquired, these users tend to remain sticky.

The offers around the IPL are critical for loss-making Vodafone Idea, which has just launched 5G in Mumbai – more than two years after Jio and Airtel – to regain some of the ground it ceded to rivals in subscriber base and revenue market share, analysts said.

“It was a natural choice for Jio to bring the most aggressive offer because of the synergies with its own OTT platform JioHotstar which is IPL’s exclusive streaming partner,” said a senior analyst at a Mumbai-based brokerage.

“It also comes at a time when Jio has set an ambitious target of growing home connections by 1 million additions each quarter,” he said, adding that combining both mobile and home offer would be the right approach to tap subscribers at a time when they are hooked to both screens.

However, adding numbers alone may not give the best outcome, he said.

“I believe Airtel should also have brought something to counter this, but these new SIM additions could be temporary and become dormant after IPL is over. They may further dilute ARPU, I suspect and hence, Airtel might have stayed away,” the analyst explained.

Airtel has the highest ARPU in the industry at Rs 245, compared with Jio at Rs 203 and Vodafone Idea at Rs 163.

Every year, telecom companies target cricket fans by launching unlimited data plans for uninterrupted streaming and higher data usage during the IPL season.

Although data usage per subscriber goes up, it does not translate into more recharges because users already have unlimited data allowance in standard offerings.

For instance, last year’s data showed that though Jio saw larger data usage growth (~2GB per sub) during IPL (March to June 2024), its ARPU remained flat. Airtel succeeded in monetisation with a larger ARPU increase to Rs 211 for the quarter ended June from Rs 209 from the previous quarter even as its per capita data consumption growth remained flat.