Airtel surpasses Reliance Jio in December 2023 active user additions; Vi continues to struggle
Bharti Airtel added more active users than Reliance Jio in December 2023, helped by strong mobile broadband user gains, while Vodafone Idea (Vi) yet again lost such users, underlining its continuing inability with take on its two bigger rivals.
Airtel and Jio added 3 million and 1.21 million active users respectively in December, while Vi lost 1.84 million active users, latest customer data put out by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) showed.
Active, or visitor location register (VLR), data put out every month by Trai, indicates the number of mobile users regularly using a mobile network.
Airtel’s active user base jumped to 377.54 million in December while Jio’s rose to 424.51 million. Vi’s active user base shrank to 196.68 million, as per Trai data.
Latest VLR data collated by the regulator showed that Airtel had 98.9% of its users active on the network, 92.32% for Jio and 88.18% for Vi.
On the gross customer additions score, though, Jio’s gains were higher than Airtel’s. Data collated by the regulator showed that Jio added 3.99 million mobile users while Airtel reported 1.85 million additions, continuing to be weighed down by the hefty hikes taken in its base prepaid rates. Vi continued to suffer heavy losses, resulting in its gross mobile user base shrinking further by 1.36 million to 223.05 million. Jio and Airtel’s gross user bases were higher at 459.81 million and 381.73 million respectively in December.
Trai data showed Jio widened its customer market share to 39.69% (39.49%) while
