According to data from the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), Bharti Airtel has added around 300 percent more users. TRAI shows that New Delhi-based Airtel added more than 5.89 million subscribers during this month, while Mumbai-based Jio has added more than 1.95 million new subscribers. However, Jio continued to lead the telecommunications sector with the largest wireless subscriber base in the country.

Market Share and subscribers

Data provided by TRAI shows that Airtel grew to 344.60 million wireless subscribers while Jio’s total wireless subscriber base surpassed 410.73 million in January.

Jio’s market share fell from 35.43% to 35.30% in January. However, Airtel made little and rose to 29.62 percent from 29.36 percent market share in December 2020.

Airtel leads the monthly growth rate chart with growth of 1.74 percent recorded in January, while Jio posted growth of 0.48 percent. Similarly, on behalf of active wireless subscribers, as suggested by local visitor registry (VLR) data, Airtel continued to take Jio for the second time in a row in January and took the lead with its 335.77 million VLR clients.

However, Jio was having almost 324.52 million VLR subscribers in the January. VLR is a database that stores information about users who move on a particular network. A user can only be present in one VLR at any one time. Therefore, it is a best estimate of the number of active users that are currently on the network.

In comparison to Airtel and Jio, in January, Vodafone Idea (Vi) managed to add more than 1.71 million subscribers. The Vodafone Idea operator was having a total of 285.96 million wireless subscribers according to TRAI data. BSNL has added 81,659 wireless subscribers during the month of January 2021, helping it reach a total wireless subscriber base of 118.69 million. Vi’s market share fell to 24.58 percent in December from 24.64 percent in January. BSNL also saw a slight decrease in its market share from 10.29 percent in the previous month.

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Data released by TRAI shows that a total of 7.63 million mobile number portability (MNP) requests in January. The largest number of NPM applications was received from 47 million from Karnataka. This was followed by Maharashtra, where customers submitted 44.94 million NPM requests.

In terms of broadband service providers, Jio maintained its leadership in January with 412.98 million subscribers (including fixed and wireless broadband, including 4G SIM cards), followed by Airtel 184.64 million, Vi 122.72 million , BSNL 26.67 million and ACT FiberNet at 1.80. million. TRAI data also revealed that at the end of January, the top five service providers accounted for 98.84 percent of the market share.