Reliance Jio added 8.6 lakh customers in the first month of its operation, overtaking You Broadband, which has a total of 7.5 lakh customers, in the first month itself. Jio also equaled Hathway Cable’s broadband customer numbers in its first month of commercial operation.
At the end of the first month, Jio had one third the number of wired broadband connections as Bharti Airtel, which has been providing landline connections for more than two decades.
That said, most of Jio’s new fiber subscribers are likely to have been converts from the trial service it has been operating for the last 3-4 years.
It had announced that it will transition trial users into commercial subscribers over the first few weeks of launch.
The exact pace of Jio’s Fiber rollout will become apparent by the second month.
GEO SPLIT
As expected, most of the company’s subscribers have come from metro and Category A telecom circles.
Going by broad trends, the three metro circles — Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata — are estimated to have accounted for over 3 lakh out of the 8.6 lakh customers that the company showed at the end of its first month of commercial operations.
Category A circles, which comprise four South Indian states as well as Maharashtra and Mumbai, are estimated to have contributed about 3.3 lakh customers.
Category B circles, which comprise states like Kerala, Punjab, MP and UP, are estimated to have contributed around 1.7 lakh, while ‘C’ category states care estimated to have accounted for around half a lakh customers.
TREND REVERSAL
The launch of Jio’s wired services also helped India reverse the decades-long trend of declining wired connections.
Thanks to the 8.6 lakh additions from Jio, the month of September saw overall wired connections in India increase by 6.3 lakh — marking the first time the number has shown an increase in several years.
In August, for example, the number of wired subscribers had shown a decline of 1.5 lakh, while in July, it had fallen by 2 lakh.
Within just one month of its operations, the Mukesh Ambani-led firm also captured a 4% share of the total wireline phone market in India. Wireline phone market does not include the wired connections given by cable providers, as they don’t provide a landline phone number to their customers.
India had a total of 21.5 million (215 lakh) wireline phone connections at the end of September.
Against this, India had a total of 19 million wired broadband connections, including those provided by over 300 internet service providers including cable operators.
Within this market, BSNL, the state-owned operator, continued to dominate, and accounted for around half (8.69 million) of the total, followed by Bharti Airtel with 2.41 million, ACT Broadband with 1.48 million, and Hathway Cable with 0.86 million.