RJio sees huge data traffic in Q1 FY24, avg mthly cons rises 7.8%

India’s largest telecom operator by market share Reliance Jio witnessed a seven-quarter high growth in per capita data consumption on its network in the April-June quarter.

The growth was led by events like Indian Premier League (IPL), 5G adoption, home broadband services, the company said.

In the April-June quarter, average data consumption per user per month on Jio’s network rose 7.8% quarter-on-quarter (QoQ) to 24.9 GB. On a year-on-year (YoY) basis, the per capita data consumption on Jio’s network increased 20%. In the January-March quarter, per capita data consumption for the company grew 3.1% to 23.1 GB.

“This quarter, the monthly data traffic crossed 11 exabyte for the quarter, on the whole it was more than 33. And this was a function of multiple things: of course, 5G adoption also now showing up on network, fibre-to-home ramp up, as well as some events like IPL which resulted in a lot of data consumption on the network,” said Anshuman Thakur, head of strategy at Reliance Jio.

“We are continuing to build capacity in the network both through the 5G expansion,” he said, adding that they are “well prepared for data traffic growing much more in the quarters to come”.

While the growth trigger for data consumption was set by streaming of FIFA and Women’s IPL on Jio Cinema, in Men’s IPL Jio witnessed nearly 32 million concurrent users watching IPL at its peak with more than 17 billion streams served over the season.

In total, the streaming of IPL over Jio Cinema translated into 160 billion minutes of watch time, the company said.

Prior to the April-June quarter, Reliance Jio witnessed a 12.8% QoQ growth in the per capita data consumption in the July-September quarter of FY22 to 17.6 GB. At that time, the growth was led by shift to work-from-home set-up by companies during Covid-19, higher content consumption by people and improvement of subscriber mix.

That was the same quarter when the company witnessed a net subscriber reduction of 11 million, largely due to the removal of inactive subscribers from its network.

Interestingly, in the April-June quarter, Jio’s net subscriber addition at 9.2 million were the highest in four quarters. Increase in subscriber base too led to increase in data consumption on Jio’s network.

One of the key reasons for Jio to see higher user addition, is because of the churn of subscribers by Vodafone Idea.

“While the rest of the industry has seen (subscriber) de-growth of nearly 3.7%, that has largely been driven by nearly 7% growth year on year in Jio subscriber base. And if you look at the net port-ins, we were about two and a half times the net port-ins for us as compared to our nearest competitor,” said Kiran Thomas, president at Reliance Jio.

“But if you look at even from a retention perspective, and also net port in coming from other operators, all of this is being driven by the superior network quality that is being established through both the 5G and the 4G deployments which are underway,” Thomas added.

As of June-end, Reliance Jio’s total subscribers were at 448.5 million. With regard to the completion of 5G rollout, the company said it is ahead of time. “Our plan on record is to complete pan-India rollout before the end of this calendar year,” Thomas said.

Till now, Jio has deployed over 115,000 sites with 690,000 5G cells covering more than 90% towns. Financial Express