Broadband
One Broadband crosses half-a-million customers
KOLKATA: ONEOTT iNTERTAINMENT Ltd (OIL), a subsidiary of NXTDigital Ltd the integrated media vertical of the Hinduja Group, has achieved yet another milestone by crossing half-a-million home broadband customers to enter in the top five private wired ISPs in India, joining groups like Reliance JIO combine, Bharti Airtel, Voda-Idea and ACT.
OIL’s vision is to continue to drive the digital inclusion agenda in India by connecting homes and offices online while following its core values of employee first, customer responsiveness, innovation, joyfulness and simplicity. The company in the final stages of launching smart security, smart lighting and IoT solutions for smart living, thereby, bringing ‘Future-To-The-Home powered on a Fiber-Optic To The Home (FTTH)’.
OIL CEO Yugal Kishore Sharma said, “OIL has consistently strived to transform the lives of its customers by providing a seamless internet experience backed by a proactive & responsive customer care over ONE Wire using ONE Device for ONE Home aligned with our brand identity – ONE. OIL has had a stupendous 32x growth with its customer base crossing the half-a-million mark in the last 4 years of its operation with commensurate growth in revenues. From being a small player in the over 50+ ISPs about 4 years back to now moving into the top five Private wired ISPs, this is an achievement by any yardstick.”
OIL looks to leverage this huge opportunity where the usage of internet in these Covid2019 pandemic times has moved beyond browsing and social networking to work-from-home, on-line education, OTT entertainment & gaming, online-shopping, online-health, e-governance, others. Coping-up with the ever-increasing demand for the internet, OIL has adapted to this consumption surge by doubling its internet capacity on the supply side without passing the additional cost to its customers to maintain the customer experience that has led OIL to add at an average of about a thousand customers a day during the pandemic.
OIL plans to consolidate its operations and work on equitable partnerships with last-mile owners or LMOs. NXTDigital today connects 5.38 million video subscriber homes in 1500+ cities and towns of India through its digital cable television (CATV) and headend-in-the-sky (HITS) platforms, served by over 9,000 LMOs. The company is leveraging this huge synergy to upsell and bundle internet services to each of these video homes. Enabling these high potential growth markets with high-speed-internet and digital platform services with LMOs is the key to OIL’s go-to-market strategy.
It has successfully evolved its inorganic growth model by leveraging operational synergies with smaller ISP strategic partners. The organization will lead the on-demand economy wave by offering convergent solutions, such as internet, OTT and voice over one wire one device for one family.
Yugal Sharma also shared that, in 2019, OIL announced a strategic partnership with Facebook to provide Wi-Fi hotspots across Mumbai. OIL’s ‘ONE Express Wi-Fi by Facebook’ Hotspots extend an umbrella coverage across Dharavi in Mumbai, enabling consumers to access free 2GB data per day for first 30 days to serve its vision to lead contribution to lead contribution to the digital inclusion in India.
Broadband
Airtel and Jio surge ahead as Vodafone Idea and BSNL lose subscribers in December
India’s mobile base rises in December, but gains skewed towards the top two operators
NEW DELHI: India’s telecom market ended 2025 with a familiar split: the leaders sprinting ahead, the laggards slipping further. Fresh data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) show Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio adding millions of wireless users in December, while Vodafone Idea and state-run BSNL continued to bleed subscribers.
India’s overall telephone subscriber base, wireless and wireline, climbed to 1.306 billion in December 2025, a monthly rise of 0.66 per cent. Growth was driven largely by wireless, which accounted for the bulk of new additions.
Bharti Airtel added 5.42 million wireless subscribers during the month, the biggest net gain among operators. Reliance Jio followed with roughly 2.96 million additions. Their gains were spread across multiple licensed service areas, underscoring broad-based momentum.
The story was starkly different for their rivals. Vodafone Idea recorded a net loss of about 9.4 lakh wireless subscribers, extending a run of monthly erosion. BSNL also saw its base shrink by around 2.06 lakh users. Despite marginal gains in a few circles, the PSU’s overall wireless base continued to contract.
Taken together, net wireless (mobile) additions across operators stood at 7.23 million in December.
Wireless subscribers, including mobile and fixed wireless access (FWA), rose to 1.258 billion, a net monthly increase of 8.21 million. Wireless tele-density improved to 88.41 per cent, though the urban–rural divide remained wide: urban tele-density at 140.66 per cent versus 59.07 per cent in rural areas.
The wireline segment posted modest growth. Subscribers increased from 47.05 million in November to 47.37 million in December, a 0.68 per cent monthly rise. Urban areas continued to dominate, while rural wireline tele-density stayed low.
Broadband crossed a symbolic milestone, with total subscribers topping one billion to reach 1,007.35 million by December-end. Mobile wireless broadband remained the primary access mode. In fixed wireless access, 5G FWA subscribers grew 5.59 per cent month on month, signalling gradual uptake of next-generation services.
Yet churn remains high. TRAI noted that about 16.12 million subscribers submitted mobile number portability requests in December alone.
The scoreboard is clear: scale is breeding more scale at the top, while smaller players struggle to hold ground. In India’s brutally competitive telecom arena, December’s numbers show a market that is still growing, but not evenly—and momentum, for now, sits firmly with the frontrunners.
