In a surprising turn of events, Reliance Jio lost 12.9 million subscribers in December 2021. During the same month, Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) and Bharti Airtel added 1.1 million and 0.47 million users, says Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) data. Vodafone Idea (Vi) again lost 1.6 million users during December. BSNL would be happy with the prepaid tariff hikes as many low paying subscribers in Jio, Vi, and Airtel might have shifted to the state-run telco. In terms of market share, Reliance Jio held 36%, followed by Bharti Airtel with 30.81%, Vodafone Idea with 23%, BSNL and MTNL with 9.90% and 0.28%, respectively.
Reliance Jio Lose Subscribers Steeply, But it Will Help With VLR Ratio
Reliance Jio might be working to remove the inactive subscribers from its total user pool. Along with that, the prepaid tariff hikes might have pushed the low-income users to go to BSNL’s network. However, it did do one wonder for Jio. Reliance Jio now has a better VLR percentage or active subscribers percentage than Vodafone Idea. Airtel leads the category with 98.01% of its user base being active followed by Reliance Jio with 87.64% and Vodafone Idea with 86.42%. BSNL had 50.32% of its subscriber base active during the month. Reliance Jio will certainly benefit from the exercise as its average revenue per user (ARPU) growth will be better with the tariff hikes kicked in. Jio still has the most number of overall active subscribers in the country. Airtel had 348.69 million active subscribers as compared to Jio’s 364.34 million active users. During the month, there were a total of 8.54 million Mobile Number Portability (MNP) requests were made, out of which 4.91 million requests came from Zone-1 and the remainder 3.63 million requests came from Zone-2. In MNP Zone-1, the highest number of requests were made in Maharashtra, while in MNP Zone-2, Uttar Pradesh saw the highest number of MNP requests.
