Jio Much Closer To 9 Million Fwa Users While Airtel Growth Slows

Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel are the only two telecom operators in India who are offering Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) services throughout the country. Vodafone Idea is still missing out from this category of competition. If and when Vi offers this service, it will just be again playing catch up with its competitors. When 5G was announced, one of the biggest use cases of the technology was FWA service. In India, people have got to know about the FWA service as AirFiber. AirFiber is just the branding, but the underlying tech is mobile networks, that are being distributed as super high-speed and reliable internet service to home and office customers. Now, in this segment again, Jio is absolutely killing it. Bharti Airtel is big, but again, it is in the second rank, like is the case with wireless and wireline broadband business market.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), just came out with the fresh number for the FWA services for the month ending May 2026. Let’s take a look at these numbers.

Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel FWA Difference

Jio saw its FWA customer base reach 8.96 million at the end of May 2026. However, Bharti Airtel’s FWA customer base grew to 3.76 million, marking a huge difference between the numbers of the two operators. In percentage growth, Jio saw its user base grow by 1.99% while Airtel only saw a growth of 0.21%.

Now it is worth noting that TRAI has started reporting the UBR FWA numbers separately. Jio’s UBR (unlicensed band radio) business is actually larger than the entire FWA business of Bharti Airtel. If you are talking about the difference in the home broadband business of the two telcos, may this would be a good point to remember. For Airtel also, it would take time to catch up to Jio purely due to distribution access and availability.