World Cup doesn't result in large data push for telcos like Airtel and Vi

The long standing strategy of offering large data packages to subscribers might come back to haunt India’s top telcos including Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea. Revenues have been short when compared to the amount of data being used.

The World Cup did boost mobile data usage by 4 percent sequentially in the December quarter. However, the revenue growth as a result is modest at around 1 percent. The reason being the large chunks of unused data the consumers possess resulting in them not upgrading to premium plans.

This was only further propelled by consumers using WiFi to watch the World Cup on their smartphones as opposed to their mobile data.

What is expected to serve as a boon this quarter is the festive season along with the assembly elections in states such as Rajasthan, Chattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Mizoram. This along with the number of 5G user additions by Jio and Airtel during the October-December period.

As per analysts, this quarter could boost data usage levels by as much as 7-8 percent which in-turn would boost revenues by 3-3.5 percent this quarter.

During sporting events such as the Indian Premier League (IPL), telcos reported a boost in data usage in the first quarter. Jio and Airtel reportedly experienced an 8 percent and 4 percent growth in monthly data usage respectively, driven by the adoption of 5G. Vi, without 5G reported a 3.82 percent growth in data usage in the June quarter as users upgraded to 4G phones to watch the IPL.

However, as per analysts, mapping data trends between the World Cup and the IPL isn’t a like-to-like comparison. While viewership levels remained fairly consistent during the IPL, it was only the big matches in the World Cup like India-Australia (that holds the record of 59 million concurrent viewers on the streaming platform) where viewership peaked.