Reliance Jio Q1 Results: Users Consume More Data Per Month as Jio Overtakes Airtel

Reliance Jio has announced its financial report for Q1 FY 2019-20, and while the numbers have remained consistently strong, what would give the operator further heart is its steadily increasing volume of data and voice usage per user per month. According to the financial report furbished by Jio, the operator's per-user data usage every month reached 11.4GB, up 7.6 percent from 10.6GB in 1Q19. Jio's report further coincides with data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) that has seen it finally usurp the second spot in the Indian telecom space from Bharti Airtel, subsequently hitting 331.3 million users as of June 30, 2019.

This marks an important point in the Indian telecom industry. Since the advent of Jio, rival operators have faced tremendous competition owing to increasingly affordable data and calling plans offered by the operator, alongside affordable handsets and dongles in Tier II cities and beyond. The move has also helped push India's adoption of 4G networks, as well as pushing down the overall cost of connectivity in the country. Over nearly two years, Jio has stayed at the top of TRAI's list of new users for each operator, adding an average of 11 million users every quarter to its network. Jio has also topped TRAI's internet speeds report for mobile operators for 28 months, with average download speed of 20.9Mbps recorded in May 2019 data by TRAI's MySpeed app.

Jio's total data traffic for the first quarter of FY20 stood at 1.06 million TB, while voice traffic reached 786 billion minutes for the quarter. It is hence a bit of a surprise to note the slight decline in average revenue per user, which now stands at Rs 122 per month. However, that can be attributed to higher discount seasonal offers, as well as more competitive services by operators in broadband and mobile networks. Jio also noted an increase of nearly 75 percent in daily voice traffic among users, showing a stronger adoption of 4G services across India in comparison to last year. This is further reflected in the 59.3 percent increase in total user count year-on-year, as it continues the upward curve in terms of market share in the Indian telecom space.

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