Bharti Airtel, India’s largest telecom company, reported a loss of around 7.7 mln data users in the three months between October and December, due to the free services offered by Reliance Jio.
Jio, on its part, had picked up around 50 mln free data and voice users on its nationwide 4G network by the end of December.
With this, the total number of data users on Bharti Airtel is at 54.9 mln, compared to about 75 mln on Reliance Jio.
Of these 55 mln users on Airtel, only 37.7 mln users are high-speed data consumers.
Jio’s services also impacted Airtel’s total data traffic as well.
Total traffic on the network fell 3.5% compared to the previous three months to 171.8 million MBs.
The average data revenue generated by one user also fell to Rs 175 per month from 201 per month in the preceding quarter.
Moreover, the amount of money that the company was able to charge for 1 GB of data fell to Rs 180 from Rs 201 three months earlier.
Reliance Jio, however, did not seem to have much of an impact on Bharti’s voice volume, which actually increased.
Total voice on the network actually increase by 5.4% to 330 bln minutes.
However, the amount of money that Airtel was able to generate from each minute of voice fell to 29.42 paise from 32.42 paise three months earlier — a drastic fall.
This indicates that the increase in voice traffic was because of incoming calls from Jio’s network.