Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Jio in September added over 13 million subscribers to its network, while its rivals Bharti Airtel, Idea and Vodafone together lost over one crore customers, as per industry reports. Jio's subscriber base was 239 million in August this year, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India's (Trai) data for August showed.
In its financial earnings report for the quarter ended September 2018, the company had claimed its subscribers' number at 252 million showing a rise of 13 million from August. The industry body Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), however, does not release data on Reliance Jio's subscriber base. Also, it does not include numbers of BSNL, MTNL and other firms that are not the members of the COAI.
But, in the case of other operators, COAI data showed that the subscriber base of Bharti Airtel declined to 343.5 million in September from 345.8 million in August -- losing 2.35 million customers.
Idea Cellular's user base fell to 213.1 million in September from 217.1 million in August, showing 4.06 million subscribers left the network. Vodafone had 225.56 million users in September as against 221.8 million in August, losing 3.76 million subscribers, COAI data showed.
Vodafone and Idea, though they merged in the end of August, have submitted their subscribers data separately to the industry body. "All the operators have expanded their services across the country, and have begun heavily diversifying their services beyond voice and data for the consumer," COAI Director General Rajan S Mathews said.
COAI report said that India's private telecom service providers (COAI member telecom operators) have a total of 1017.7 million mobile subscribers including subscriber figures of Reliance Jio Infocomm as of August 2018.
