BSNL loses over 24 lakh subscribers in Sep’23: Trai

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State owned telecom BSNL lost over 24 lakh subscribers in single month of September 2023, according to latest figures released by Telephone Regulatory Authority of India. Apparently, poor connections forced customers to leave the state owned telecom and join private peers like Jio and Airtel in the month under consideration.

Public telecoms like BSNL and MTNL continued to loose customers. As a result, market share of state-owned telecoms in both the wireless and wired segment further shrinked to 8 per cent and 27 per cent, respectively. Public telecoms’ loss is private telecoms’ gain! On one hand, state-owned telecoms continued to face shrinking pie of the overall market share. At the same time, on the other hand, private peers continued to gain larger share of the pie. Private telecom’s market share in wireless and wired segment further zoomed to 91 per cent and 72 per cent, respectively.

Both BSNL and MTNL continued to loose customers in both these segments. At the same time, Airtel added 14.69 lakh new customers in September 2023. While, telecom behemoth, Jio added highest number of 36.03 lakh new subscribers in the same month. While, Vodafone Idea (VI) lost 7.49 lakh customers in single month of September. In wired segment, VI’s market share further shrinked to 19 per cent. While, in wireless segment, the Aditya Birla Group owned telecom’s market share narrowed down to mere two per cent by September 2023 end.

Currently, there are total number of 118 crore telecom subscribers in the country.