Reliance Jio lost about 4 million wireless users in August 2024, but at the same time, the telco added about 7 lakh wireline users. While 7 lakh or 0.7 million doesn't sound too big, in the wireline segment, it is a lot. Comparatively, Bharti Airtel and Tata Tele added 33,000 and 24,000 wireline users. Vodafone Idea also added about 5,000 wireline users. BSNL (Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited) added wireless users but lost wireline users to the tune of 50,000 approximately.
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Reliance Jio kept the largest market share in the wireline segment during the month, with over 39.65% of the market under its belt. Bharti Airtel stood in the second position with 25.46% market share, while BSNL stood in the third with 17.07% share.
In the wired space, Jio had 13.54 million users, Airtel had 8.29 million users, BSNL had 4.20 million, and Atria Convergence Technologies (ACT) had 2.27 million users. Amongst the internet service providers (ISPs), ACT is the largest non-telco ISP in the country. Excitel is also growing pretty fast in the space as the ISP has already achieved the 1 million users milestone as well.
At the end of August 2024, there were a total of 42.84 million wired broadband subscribers.
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Wired Broadband a Huge Opportunity in India
The Indian market is quite diverse. Compared to wireless users, wired connection users are fairly small in number. This is a huge opportunity in India, as remote work and freelancing culture is only on the rise. In fact, most of the entertainment that people consume while at home is through their wired broadband connections.
Players like Excitel are targetting smaller cities and offering slightly more affordable broadband plans to consumers in a bid to garner a huge subscriber base in the short-term. Jio is ahead of the other players in the segment by a huge margin.
