Telecom service provider Bharti Airtel said its 4G LTE user base crossed 100,000 during the third quarter of fiscal 2014.
Airtel 4G service is currently available in 4 cities – Kolkatta, Bangalore, Pune and Chandigarh — and it offers the services on high-speed devices such as dongles and routers.
The company does not share 4G ARPU.
The 1 lakh mark is too low for Airtel comparing with LTE user base of telecom operators in Korea.
You may read: SK Telecom 4G user base touches 13.5 million last year
Airtel mobile data growth
The increasing customer need for data witnessed in the earlier quarters continued during this quarter as well. Airtel had 54.4 million data customers as on December 31, 2013, representing a growth of 31.2 percent as compared to 41.5 million data customers at the end of the corresponding quarter last year.
By the end of the quarter, 27.4 percent of the total customer base were active data users as compared to 22.8 percent in the corresponding quarter last year. The total MBs on the network increased 97.0 percent to 39 billion MBs during the quarter as compared to 19.8 billion MBs in the corresponding quarter last year, said Airtel.
Data usage per customer also witnessed an increase of 54.4 percent to 249 MBs during the quarter as compared to 161 MBs in the corresponding quarter last year. Increase in total data consumption resulted in a higher data ARPU by 58.7 percent to Rs 75 during the quarter as compared to the corresponding quarter last year.
Airtel customer churn dips
As on December 31, 2013, Airtel had 198.5 million GSM mobile customers on its network. The VLR ratio for the quarter improved to 95.3 percent as compared to 95.0 percent in the corresponding quarter last year.
The churn ratio dropped to 2.7 percent from 5.9 percent in the corresponding quarter last year.
Total minutes on network increased 5.9 percent to 255.0 billion from 240.8 billion in the corresponding quarter last year.
Voice realization per minute continued its improving trend during the quarter; the realization of 37.13 paise reflects an increase of 1.96 paise over the corresponding quarter last year.
Baburajan K
editor@telecomlead.com
