By comparison,
’s added 0.27 million wireless customers, users taking its gross user base to 354.46 million while Vodafone Idea (Vi) lost another 1.07 million, lowering its user base to 269.99 million and reflecting its continuing struggles in the 4G operations front.
Jio’s sharper-than-expected fall in mobile users, in fact, reduced India’s mobile user base by 20.7 million to around 1.16 billion in September 2021, according to latest subscriber data issued by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Monday.
Jio, in fact, had reported an over 11 million drop in its customer base in the July-September period, which, though, had partly boosted its average revenue per user (ARPU) in the fiscal second quarter to Rs 144 from Rs 138 in the April-June period.
Trai data showed Airtel and Vi marginally widened customer market shares to 30.4% (29.85%) and 23.15% (22.84%) respectively in September, while Jio’s narrowed to 36.43% (37.40%), triggered by the latter’s removal of dormant users.
Jio lost nearly 6.6 million users in rural India in September. Bharti Airtel and Vi, by contrast, suffered fewer rural user losses at 0.78 million and 0.74 million respectively.
Jio’s rural mobile user base fell to 184.29 million while Airtel and Vi’s dipped modestly to 169.99 million and 137.21 million respectively.
Over the past few months, Jio had been consolidating its leadership in rural markets, helped by strong rural consumer appetite for aggressive offers on its older 4G feature phone, JioPhone. But September customer numbers, collated by Trai, show the telecom market leader also weeded out low-paying users in the rural markets.
Visitor Location Register (VLR), a key metric reflecting the number of active subscribers on a mobile network, showed that 97.86% of the users were active for Bharti Airtel, 87.31% for Vi and 83.65% for Jio in September.
