The Telecom Churn: Vodafone Idea loses rural connect, Jio is urban king

While Jio has consistently added new subscribers (net addition) every year since its launch, Airtel has been able to contain porting out with porting in and new subscribers as they take up smartphones.

Vodafone lost out, not so much in the immediate years after Jio’s entry, as much after the pandemic. In fact, Airtel and Jio added a similar number of net new customers from September 2020 to September 2021, eating into the subscriber base of Vi with nearly equal force.

Chart 1 also shows consolidation of the telecom industry from multiple to three players, and the relatively elastic subscriber