Bharti Airtel has been gaining pace at adding new subscribers and might be making Reliance Jio nervous with its performance in the last few months. The analysts at Opensignal, a global mobile analytics company, believe that the reason behind such a stellar growth for Airtel is providing a better network experience to its users. The price difference between the plans from both the telcos has become negligible. Jio’s strength was its cheaper offerings. But since the time Jio hiked tariffs and came closer to Airtel’s pricing, it seems like users prefer Airtel over Jio.
Airtel Gained Highest Proportion of Users in 2020
While Reliance Jio is still the number one telecom operator of the country, Bharti Airtel gained the highest proportion of users in 2020. Both the telcos were gaining new subscribers at a similar pace until August 2020, but from September 2020, Jio’s curve for new subscribers almost flattened and went on a declining trend from mid-November.
At the same time, Airtel’s curve for new subscriber additions kept going up throughout the end of the year. While both Jio and Airtel were adding new subscribers, Vodafone Idea (Vi) kept losing subscribers and added very few new users.
After the telcos hiked the tariffs in 2019, the analysts found that users dropped from a particular network because of poor network quality. Across all the private operators (Jio, Airtel, and Vi), users who ported to other networks were spending 74% to 155% more time without being connected to a mobile signal compared to the average scores on the respective networks.
Thus report from Opensignal indicates that most of the users who were porting to other networks had an issue with the network quality they were getting with their operator. Reliance Jio needs to enhance its network quality as fast as possible to keep leading the mobile telecom market in India.
