New Delhi: Telcos lost 8.2 million mobile subscribers in April which was also the first full month of India's lockdown against the spread of COVID-19 pandemic, according to telecom subscription data released by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) for the month of April.
As per data, telecom giants Airtel and Vodafone suffered a huge loss of subscribers. While Airtel lost 5.2 million subscribers, Vodafone-Idea lost 4.5 million.
Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Jio, on the other hand, added 1.6 million subscribers in April it is one of the lowest monthly additions in recent times. The market share of Reliance Jio by the end of April 30 is 33.85% while Airtel has 28.06% share in the market followed by Vodafone-Idea (27.37%), BSNL(10.43%) and MTNL(0.29%).
The private access service providers held 89.28% market share of wireless subscribers whereas PSU access service providers had market share of only 10.72%.
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Not only wireless subscribers but telephone subscribers have also decreased by 0.72% in April as compared to March. In March India had 1,177.97 million telephone subscribers but in April end it was 1,169.44million. BSNL and MTNL held 58.14 of wireline market share followed by Airtel, Tata, Reliance and Vodafone.
Lockdown in India witnessed migration from urban to rural areas and the percentage of active mobile subscribers increased marginally. The urban wireless teledensity decrease from 13 8.41 % to 136.2% whereas rural teledensity increased from 58.54% to 58.61 %.
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Telecom companies forced to extend the validity of mobile plans has a large number of lower and subscribers could not recharge from retail outlets.
After scrutinisation by TRAI, the selective validity plans were extended till 3 May of low-income customers by Airtel and Vodafone. The value of these extended validity plans was more than 500 crores as estimated by Telecom experts.
