Three major telecom conglomerates have released their July September performance show. Remarkably, for the first time ever, Reliance Jio was no longer the fastest-growing data operator in India, losing the crown to Bharti Airtel.

Jio’s mobile data traffic scaled up by 220 million GBs in July-September compared to the previous three months, Bharti Airtel’s traffic expanded much faster at 391 million GBs. The third operator, Vodafone Idea, on the other hand, witnessed its mobile wireless data traffic shrink by around 180 million GBs. The situation is surprising since Airtel’s 4G network is only around half the size of Jio’s , that is with around 4 lakh base stations compared to Jio’s 8 lakhs or so, while Airtel’s data traffic grew by 5.5 percent, Jio’s grew by only 1.5 percent.

Jio added only 6.67 million total new users including 4G during the July-September quarter, while Airtel added an enormous 14.4 million new users on its 4G network.  The subscriber addition number posted by Jio is one of the lowest quarterly numbers in its history and explains the slippage in 4G growth rate. As far as Airtel is concerned, to sustain the explosive growth in 4G users and usage, it has been investing a large number into its 4G network, adding over 30,000 nodes during the July-September period alone.

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