• As India’s communications services sector tops 1.2 billion connections, the country’s challenger operators are fighting hard to stay competitive
• Vodafone Idea (Vi) is on course to get another financial helping hand from its biggest shareholder, the Indian government, as it continues its 5G rollout
• State-owned BSNL, the smallest of India’s four telcos, is using indigenous technology to launch innovative 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) services
• But as the latest stats show, the market is still dominated by the two main operators, Jio and Airtel, and they’re the only ones growing their subscriber bases

Vodafone Idea (Vi), India’s third-largest mobile operator, looks set for yet another financial lifeline from the country’s lawmakers following reports that the government is set to provide some kind of relief related to the 834bn rupees ($9.7bn) the telco owes in adjusted gross revenues (AGR)-related payments. 

Vi has been in financial difficulty for a few years and the government has already undertaken debt-for-equity swap deals to relieve the telco’s financial burden: As a result, the state is now Vi’s single biggest shareholder with a near 49% stake, though the operator’s initial main shareholders, Vodafone Group and Aditya Birla Group, still have operational control over the debt-laden telco. 

Now, according to The Economic Times, the government is considering extending the deadline by which Vi should pay its AGR dues to 20 years from the current six. It is hoped this would allow the operator to remain solvent and invest in its network and services in order to remain competitive with the country’s two market leaders, Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel. News of the latest potential lifeline was enough to give Vi’s share price a 5.5% boost on Tuesday to 6.91 rupees. 

Vi would welcome any relief as it plays 4G and 5G catchup with Jio and Airtel: In recent months Vi has been launching its 5G services in major markets, the most recent being Bengaluru, having awarded $3.6bn worth of radio access network equipment deals to Ericsson, Samsung and Nokia to improve 4G coverage and roll out its 5G network. It has also just struck a satellite services deal with AST SpaceMobile. 

But it is still years behind its two main rivals, which both launched their initial 5G services in 2022 and have been pushing hard to build up their next-gen mobile customer bases – as a result, Jio has more than 170 million 5G customers while Airtel has more than 120 million – see Why India is a remarkable 5G success story.

That’s not Vi’s only challenge: It has been losing customers and market share for some time and despite its recent investments, it still hasn’t turned the corner back to subscriber base growth. 

The latest market report from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) shows that, at the end of April this year, Vi had 204.7 million mobile connections, an impressive number by any operator’s standards. But it lost almost 648,000 customers during the month of April alone, leaving it with a mobile market share of 17.66%. 

Meanwhile, the overall market, and the subscriber bases of Vi’s main rivals, are heading in the other direction. 

Reliance Jio added more than 2.6 million mobile connections during April to take its total to 472.4 million, giving it a mobile market share of 40.76%. 

Bharti Airtel, meanwhile, added almost 171,000 connections to end April with almost 390 million mobile users and a market share of 33.65%.

State-owned BSNL, which is also only still in business due to the largesse of the government, lost 155,000 customers to end April with 90.9 million mobile connections and a market share of 7.84%. 

In total, India ended April with 1,166.43 million mobile/wireless connections and 37.41 million wireline connections, taking the total number of communications services connections to 1,204 million. 

The TRAI reports are now also including an update on 5G fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband service growth, as this is seen as the most efficient way of delivering high-speed broadband connections to the majority of the population without the need for laying fibre or any other type of fixed line technology whilst also making further use of the 5G spectrum awarded to the operators. At the end of April, there were 7.5 million 5G FWA subscribers, up from 6.77 million at the end of March. Reliance Jio is the dominant service provider in this niche but important sector, with 6.14 million 5G FWA users at the end of April, while Bharti Airtel had 1.36 million. 

With an overall communications services market so large and with so few service providers, the Indian government can’t afford to see Vi collapse and leave just two main privately owned telcos to dominate the sector in the world’s most populated country, so it’s easy to imagine that Vi will be given every helping hand possible to ensure it stays in business.

As, most likely, will BSNL, which offers its services across the whole country with the exception of Delhi and Mumbai. The financial support from the government and a renewed vigour at the operator, underpinned by the state’s desire to have domestically developed technologies deployed and proven on home soil, is likely to give it an extended life, one that was hard to imagine only a few years ago. 

Earlier this year, BSNL announced it had recorded a quarterly operating profit, its first in 17 years, and now it has unveiled an innovative FWA service based on Indian technology that it plans to roll out more broadly once it has been tested at its initial launch location in Hyderabad. 

A news report issued by the state’s Press Information Bureau (PIB) notes that BSNL has initiated the “soft launch” of the service, which is rather crassly called Quantum 5G FWA (it has nothing to do with quantum computing or quantum-safe security). 

The service is an “indigenous, SIM-less FWA solution [that] delivers fibre-like speeds over 5G radio,” noted the PIB, and is based on home-grown technology, with the packet core, radio access network (RAN) and customer premises equipment (CPE) technology all “designed and integrated by Indian vendors under the Atmanirbhar Bharat programme.” 

The SIM-less innovation is notable. According to the PIB, it is “built on BSNL’s Direct-to-Device platform so the customer’s CPE auto-authenticates [with] no physical SIM required. BSNL is the first Indian operator to showcase a production-grade SIM-less 5G service.”

The soft launch was inaugurated by BSNL’s chairman and managing director Robert J. Ravi, who stated: “Quantum 5G FWA demonstrates how Indian engineers can create world-class connectivity. It is the first SIM-less, 100% home-grown customised 5G FWA for BSNL. Hyderabad’s tech-savvy ecosystem makes it the perfect launch pad for our next-generation access portfolio. Today is only a soft launch – many more cities and feature upgrades will follow.” BSNL claims the service is delivering 980 Mbit/s downstream and 140 Mbit/s upstream in the soft launch area. 

Once the service is fine-tuned it is due to be launched in pilot schemes in Bengaluru, Pondicherry, Visakhapatnam, Pune, Gwalior and Chandigarh by September with a 100 Mbit/s downstream service package available for just 999 rupees ($11.61) per month. The same technology is set to be used to eventually launch a service level agreement (SLA)-backed service for small- and medium-sized enterprise (SME) users.

- Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director, TelecomTV