Reliance Jio, Airtel drive telecom subscriber base to 1,172.57 mn in May

New customer addition by telecom operators Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel led to a marginal growth in the country’s telecom subscriber base to 1,172.57 million in May, according to a report released by regulator Trai on Tuesday.

Subscriber loss of Vodafone Idea, BSNL and MTNL mitigated the growth of the telecom user base in May.

“The number of telephone subscribers in India increased from 1,172.52 million at the end of April-23 to 1,172.57 million at the end of May-23, thereby, showing a monthly growth rate of 0.004 per cent,” the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) said in its monthly subscriber report.

The subscriber base growth came from rural areas, where subscriptions increased to 519.14 million in May from 518.64 million. The growth was offset by a decline in the subscriber base in urban areas to 653.43 million in May from 653.88 million in April.

The wireless subscriber base grew marginally to 1,143.21 million in May from 1,143.13 million in April.

Reliance Jio recorded net subscriber addition of 3.03 million taking its total mobile customer base to 436.3 million and Bharti Airtel added 1.32 million wireless subscribers taking its total customer base to 372.31 million.

Vodafone Idea lost 2.81 million wireless subscribers. It was followed by state-owned BSNL and MTNL, which lost 1.47 million and 2,338 mobile subscribers, respectively.

The wireline subscriber base too declined to 29.36 million in May from 29.39 million in April, with BSNL and MTNL losing the highest number of customers.

Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel led new subscriber addition in the wireline segment as well.

Jio added 3,25,336, Airtel 1,25,586, Tata Teleservices 17,349, Quadrant 6,453 and V-Con Mobile and Infra added 99 new customers.

BSNL lost 4,75,708 and MTNL lost 10,823 wireline customers in May.

The total Broadband subscribers based increased to 856.81 million in May from 850.94 million in April.