Jio second in user base with 23% market share: Report

Proving to be a true disruption, Reliance Jio has become the second telecom player in terms of users, capturing more than 23 per cent of the Indian market, a report revealed on Wednesday.

According to mobile communication app Truecaller's 'TrueInsights Q4 Report', Jio has grown aggressively in the latter half of 2016, racking up over 16.2 million subscribers in November and taking its total subscriber base to 51.87 million within three months of launching the service.

"Investigating the last six months of usage, we can see that Jio has grown aggressively at the end of 2016 summer. Jio racked up millions of customers in their first few months and picked up the pace of acquisition towards the end of the year," the report stated.

The growth is owing to the Jio welcome offer of providing unlimited data to its subscribers till March 31 this year.

As per the latest data from TRAI, India's telecom subscriber base grew to over 1.12 billion at end-November 2016 and the large number of additions were credited to Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd.

The report also found that Jio users make calls of less than 30 seconds while Vodafone users make the longest calls -- around 41 seconds.

As for the overall general calling patterns, subscribers in Jammu and Kashmir make shortest calls of 28.63 seconds while Kolkata users have the longest median call duration of 42.17 seconds.

According to TRAI data, in the month of November 2016 alone, Jio was leading in mobile broadband segment followed by Idea with net addition of 2.52 million new customers. Bharti Airtel and Vodafone added 1.08 million and 890,794 subscribers, respectively.

Mobile internet usage is expected to grow to over 500 million customers by the end of 2017 with a large portion of those picking Jio.

"As a result, there's already consolidation discussions among operators in India due to the increased competitive pressures," the report noted.

Reliance Jio has become the primary data connection on most of the mobile devices in India, with 42 per cent users having activated Jio in their 4G-enabled slot, followed by Airtel at 17.54 per cent, Vodafone at 12.26 per cent and Idea at 11.50 per cent.

Jio is also leading in data consumption, with a Jio-user logging 6.54GB on average compared to 1.28GB on Airtel, 1.29GB on Vodafone and 1.32GB on Idea.

--IANS

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