The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has released Telecom Subscription Data as of December 31, 2020, in which it revealed that Vodafone Idea lost a whopping 5.6 million users. Vi ended 2020 with an overall subscriber base of 269 million. The trend of Reliance Jio slow subscriber additions remains the same; The Mukesh Ambani-led telco added just 478,917 users in the last month of 2020, whereas its direct rival Bharti Airtel added just over four million new users. The data released by Airtel said it had 336 million users at the end of 2020, whereas Jio said it ended last year with a 410.8 million user base. BSNL lost 2.5 lakh existing users.
Trai Monthly Subscription Data for December 2020: What It Shows
The report further said that Airtel has the highest number of active subscribers amongst all the telcos. Trai says Airtel has 338.71 million total subscribers, of which 328.87 million users (97.10%) are active. Vodafone Idea is second on the list, with 90.26% subscribers active on its network. Out of the total subscriber base of Jio, just 80.21% of subscribers are active.
As for the market share, Jio leads the chart with 35.43% share, followed by Airtel with 29.36% share and Vodafone Idea with 24.64% share. BSNL ended the year with a 10.29% market share. The total wireless subscribers decreased from 1,155.20 million at the end of November 2020 to 1,153.77 million at the end of December 2020. Out of the total wireless subscribers, 975.43 million users were active.
Talking about the Mobile Number Portability (MNP) data, Trai received a total of 8.20 million requests in December 2020. It seems like a large number of Vodafone Idea and BSNL customers are porting out to Bharti Airtel.
The data reported by telecom operators during their quarterly performance results are almost similar to the data released by Trai in this report. Vi said it lost just two million subscribers in Q3 FY21 and started adding new 4G customers. The struggles for Vi are not over yet, but the telco is slowly getting back on track. Airtel seems to be best positioned right now.
