NEW DELHI : Jio remains India’s largest mobile operator, but Airtel is steadily closing the gap, adding more subscribers than its bigger rival for the fourth month running, according to fresh TRAI data.
Figures released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority on August 28 show Jio ended July with 506.03 million wireless subscribers, a 39.29 percent market share, against Airtel’s 489.49 million and 38.01 percent. Vi held 199.06 million subscribers, while BSNL had 93.18 million. That puts Jio’s lead at roughly 16.54 million subscribers, still substantial, but Airtel’s recent additions are steadily eating into it.
Airtel added 2.69 million subscribers in July against Jio’s 2.45 million, while Vi picked up 240,114 and BSNL gained 168,874. India’s total wireless subscriber base grew by about 5.54 million during the month to reach 1.288 billion. Airtel has now out-added Jio every month since April, and while July’s margin, roughly 242,000 more users than Jio, was smaller than in some earlier months, the run has kept chipping away at the market-share gap between the two.
Revenue tells a different story. Airtel earns considerably more from each customer, with average revenue per user at ₹264 for the April-June quarter, against ₹215.6 for Jio and ₹195 for Vi. Vi’s numbers are worth watching in their own right too, its ARPU climbed 10.2 percent year-on-year, and the company posted its first quarterly net subscriber addition since the Vodafone-Idea merger back in 2018, taking its total base to 193.1 million, with its 4G/5G subscriber count reaching 130.1 million.
Jio holds a much stronger grip in broadband and fixed wireless access. TRAI’s July numbers put Jio’s broadband base at 535.12 million, well ahead of Airtel’s 384.23 million, Vi’s 129.96 million and BSNL’s 27.28 million, though these figures blend wired and wireless connections together, so they don’t offer a clean comparison of fixed-line businesses alone.
The 5G FWA segment is even more one-sided: Jio counted 9.27 million subscribers there against Airtel’s 3.94 million, giving Jio roughly 70 percent of a combined 13.21 million-subscriber market. Jio also reported a further 5.14 million users on its UBR-based FWA service.
Each company is essentially winning a different fight. Airtel is adding customers faster and earning more per user, while Jio holds the largest overall mobile base along with a commanding lead in broadband and 5G FWA.
Beyond the competitive scoreboard, the telecom sector is grappling with a problem that cuts across every operator: unwanted commercial calls and messages. TRAI said AI-based detection systems flagged 24.4 billion suspected spam communications between April and June, split between 22.9 billion calls and 1.4 billion SMS messages. The regulator received 10.8 lakh complaints over unwanted commercial communication during the quarter, with 5.5 lakh deemed actionable, and about 9.6 lakh complaints, nearly 89 percent, came through TRAI’s Do Not Disturb app.
Enforcement followed at real scale. TRAI barred 1.3 lakh telecom resources for 15 days after first-time violations, disconnected another 46,786 permanently for repeat offences, blacklisted 263 senders, and blocked 2,873 SMS headers. Separately, the regulator has rolled out a revamped MyCall app this August, letting users rate calls from one to five stars and flag specific issues like dropped calls, echo, audio delay, voice breaking, cross-connection and one-way audio, alongside a coverage-testing feature that feeds anonymised data back to both operators and TRAI.
Add it all up, and July’s numbers paint a genuinely mixed picture: Jio still commands the largest subscriber base, Airtel is growing faster and earning more per customer, Jio dominates 5G FWA, and Vi is finally showing signs of stabilising after years of steady subscriber losses.
