Airtel beats rivals in March subscriber race, but Jio leads 5G fixed wireless access

Bharti Airtel maintained its lead in subscriber additions in March 2026, adding 5.09 million wireless users, significantly ahead of Reliance Jio, which added 3.23 million subscribers, according to data released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI).

For the second consecutive month, Vodafone Idea added subscriber, with March additions coming at 103,000 (February: 22,000) users to its overall subscriber base. However, much of this acceleration in subscriber addition continues to come from the telco’s performance in the M2M or enterprise connections segment, a significantly lower average revenue per user (Arpu) business.