Kolkata: Reliance Jio added more active users than Bharti Airtel in October 2024, but the Sunil Mittal-led telco strongly boosted its base of higher-paying 4G/5G users while its bigger rival lost such customers in that month.Vodafone Idea (Vi) continued to lose both active users as well as 3G/4G mobile broadband users, as per latest telco subscriber data released by the sector regulator Monday.Jio added 3.84 million active users to Airtel’s 2.72 million additions in October, while Vi lost 0.72 million active users, data put out by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) showed. Vi’s active user losses underlined its continuing inability to effectively fight bigger rivals, Jio and Airtel, as it has neither launched 5G services nor fully concluded its targeted fundraise. Vi’s targeted Rs 25,000 crore debt-raise is still pending.As per Trai data, Jio, Airtel and Vi’s active user bases were at 448.44 million, 383.4 million and 178.8 million respectively in end-October.Active, or visitor location register (VLR), data put out every month by Trai indicates the number of mobile users regularly using a mobile network.Trai’s wireless broadband users data, though, showed Airtel was the sole gainer, reporting 2.08 million 4G/5G user additions in October while market leader, Jio lost 3.76 million such users. Loss-making Vi too lost 0.92 million 3G/4G users. Vi is yet to roll out 5G networks, unlike Jio and Airtel, who have launched 5G services nationally and had 148 million and 105 million pure 5G users respectively in the quarter ended September 2024.On the gross telco customer numbers front, Airtel was the sole gainer while Jio and Vi reported heavy losses on this metric. Latest telco subscriber data collated by Trai showed that Jio lost 3.76 million mobile users while Airtel reported 1.92 million gross user additions. Jio and Vi’s customer losses resulted in their gross mobile user bases shrinking further to 460 million and 210.47 million respectively. By contrast, Airtel’s has risen to 385.41 million in October.Analysts said the sharp fall in Jio’s gross user base suggested a weeding out of inactive 4G customers, who were not generating meaningful revenue, on the back of the headline rate hikes of July. Jio’s customer base only comprises 4G and 5G users.Trai data showed Jio narrowed its customer market share in October to 39.99% (40.2%) while Airtel’s rose to 33.5% (33.24%) over the previous month. Vi’s too narrowed to 18.30% (18.41%) amid continuing customer losses.Overall wireless tele-density fell to 81.77% in October 2024. Data released by Trai also indicated that India's mobile user base fell 3.31% to 1.15 billion in October, on the back of Jio and Vi’s gross user losses.As per Trai’s latest telco customer data, Jio consolidated its market leadership in the landline segment.The telco added 0.68 million wireline users, boosting its landline user base to 15.68 million. Second-ranked Airtel added 0.22 million users, expanding its wireline user base to 9.54 million. Third-ranked state-owned BSNL conceded more ground, losing another 35,954 landline users, reducing its wireline user base further to 6.09 million, as per current Trai data.Trai data also showed that 13.45 million users submitted requests for mobile number portability in October, increasing the cumulative requests to 1052.56 million from 1039.11 million at September-end.