35pc of India's 4G subscribers come from rural areas

With the advent of Reliance Jio in India, the country has witnessed immense growth in 4G subscribers. As per a survey report from CMR, as of December 2017, around 35 percent or 83 million of India's 238 million 4G subscribers came from rural India.

Jio, although credited with bringing 4G in to India, has also made the incumbents like Airtel, Vodafone and Idea to ramp up their technology resulting in they also investing in 4G networks. As a consequence, while Jio being the 4G leader operator with 160 million subscribers at the end of December 2017, has only managed to increase 122 percent (88 million) subscribers in the year 2017, as against 457 percent (64 million) by the incumbent mobile operators.

"Though laggards, incumbents have managed to increase their 4G subscriber base 3.8 times more than the disruptor operator Jio during 2017. This could be attributed to incumbents aligning their 4G offering to that of Jio in terms of price as well as content. The early adaptors were leveraged by Jio primarily in the urban space and as incumbent operators got ready with their 4G in full scale, they focused on rural markets to look for growth," said Faisal Kawoosa, Head-New initiatives, CMR.

The report also says that JioPhone will play a critical role in the penetration of Jio 4G services in rural India. Apparently, India will have 300 million 4G subscribers by the end of 2018, of which 58 million will be using a 4G feature phone. Remaining 81 percent of the subscribers will be using 4G over a smartphone including the ones based on Android Oreo Go that are optimized for lower configuration smartphones.

CMR predicts that by 2020, 35 percent of the 4G subscribers would be using a feature phone, taking the overall 4G subscriber count to 432 million in India.