Anil Ambani led Reliance Communications which is in the process of merger with Aircel and MTS has now slipped to 6th position in the Indian mobile market after losing out almost 20 million CDMA subscribers after closing down CDMA operations for use those airwaves to trade or share with Jio to build extensive 4G network across the country.
According to latest TRAI data, the company has lost 8.40 million overall subscribers in August which is because of clearing inactive CDMA subscribers from their network. RCom which is offering GSM services has now 87 million 2G and 3G, 4G data customers on the network, thus pushing it behind BSNL and Aircel.
Aircel has 89.72 million customers on its network. Though in terms of active customer base, RCom is ahead of with having 84.37 percent of active users while out of the total customer base, only 71 percent users are active on Aircel network.
As, Jio's free offerings impacted subscriber additions of smaller operator's like Aircel and RCom in last few months, we could expect their active customer base to fall down to much lower level until they came up with similar and dirt cheap rates to protect their subscriber base.
Also, unlike before it seems the merged entity of RCom + Aircel + MTS would have near about 125 -135 million active customers instead of old estimates of more than 150 million active customers. The merged entity will be the 4th largest operator by subscriber base just behind Idea cellular.
