Telcos trim users to revive avg revenue

CHENNAI: The business revival strategies being seen in the stressed telecom sector are reducing the country’s mobile user base and widening the digital divide as total mobile subscribers declined by almost 2% in the month of March.

Telecom operators such as Bharti Airtel and the Vodafone Idea combine introduced a ‘minimum recharge’ regime recently to weed out low-paying users and thus increase their average revenue per user (ARPU). This has led to the two telcos trimming almost 4% off their user base.