NEW DELHI: State-owned telecom service provider Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) saw a significant drop in customers in November 2024, losing nearly 0.87 million users while gaining only 0.46 million new ones.
This marks the highest customer churn for BSNL since private telecom companies like Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone Idea raised their mobile tariffs up to 25% in July.
There was a major rise in customer migrations to BSNL from other telcos from July to November 2024. However, the migration of customers to BSNL has slowed down recently, possibly due to customer dissatisfaction with their network. By July 2024, only 0.31 million users left BSNL. This number further dropped to 0.26 million in August, 0.28 million in September, and increased to 0.51 million in October 2024. Meanwhile, the number of new subscribers joining BSNL surged significantly in August (2.1 mn), September (1.1 mn), and October (0.7 mn).
As per TRAI data, for the first time since the tariff hike by private telcos, Airtel added 1.9 million users in October 2024. However, Jio, India’s largest telco, continued to lose subscribers, losing 3.76 million, while Vi lost 1.97 million customers. BSNL added 0.5 million customers during the same month.