The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has released its subscribers' report for the quarter ending in March 2019. The sector regulator has compiled the data for these months, and it also gives us insight into the telecom industry, and how many subscribers have been added to the respective telecom operators or networks. The data has been divided across many verticals like the addition of wireless or wired broadband subscribers. The first thing to note is the addition of wired broadband subscribers, which denotes that the subscribers have increased by 0.72% to 18.42 million in March compared to 18.29 million in February.
Top Five Telcos Dominating 98.67% of Broadband Market
The total broadband subscribers have increased by 2.37% to 563.31 million from 550.24 million, including both wired and wireless verticals. A total of 98.67% of the entire broadband market share was dominated by the top five service providers at the end of March. These companies included Reliance Jio Infocomm with 306.72 million subscribers, Bharti Airtel with 114.62 million subscribers, Vodafone Idea with 110.22 million subscribers, BSNL with 22.14 million subscribers and Tata Tele Group with 2.10 million subscribers.
In case of wired broadband services, the top service providers remained BSNL with 9.21 million subscribers, Bharti Airtel with 2.36 million subscribers, Atria Convergence Technologies with 1.42 million subscribers, Hathway Cable & Datacom with 0.81 million subscribers and MTNL with 0.76 million subscribers. The situation was a little different in case of wireless broadband services as the market was dominated by the companies which included Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd at the top with 306.72 million customers, Bharti Airtel with 112.26 million customers, Vodafone Idea with 110.20 million customers, BSNL with 12.93 million customers and Tata Teleservices with 1.68 million customers.
Reliance Jio Adds More than Nine Million Subscribers in Previous Quarter
Considering the top three private telecom operators in the country, Reliance Jio Infocomm added 9.4 million subscribers in this period, thus pushing its subscriber base to 307.7 million. Vodafone Idea and Bharti Airtel saw a decline in this regard as their subscriber base fell by 14.5 million and 15.1 million customers, respectively, to take their subscriber bases to 394.8 million and 325.2 million, the Trai data highlighted.
Speaking of market share, Vodafone Idea still stayed on top of the charts with 33.98% market share, followed by Bharti Airtel at 27.99% and Reliance Jio with 26.40%. Trai has also noted that the total telephone subscribers in India have declined and the number which was 1,205.40 million in February 2019 has come down to 1,183.51 million at the end of March 2019, demonstrating a monthly decline rate of 1.82%. Also, a lot of subscribers ported their numbers to different operators as 5.30 million subscribers submitted their requests for Mobile Number Portability (MNP). The total number of MNP requests were 423.11 million in February to 428.40 million at the end of March 2019.
