ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023 started with much fanfare few days ago in Ahmedabad and after India’s historic win over Pakistan the excitement for World Cup 2023 has increased suddenly in India.Millions of cricket fans are watching live matches of World Cup on their mobiles and this has led to a huge jump in the mobile data usage of the country's top telecom operators. Analysts and industry executives estimate that Mukesh Ambani’s Reliance Jio and Sunil Mittal’s Bharti Airtel will register around 6 percent sequential growth in mobile data usage levels in the December quarter.
Strong digital viewership is being seen among cricket fans who are using 5G services and due to lack of 5G services, the growth in mobile data consumption of Vodafone Idea is expected to remain low during the World Cup too. Telecom companies executives are also expecting an increase in mobile data consumption because due to the World Cup, there will be an increase in upgrades from 4G to 5G and 2G to 4G. This is because Disney-Hotstar is live streaming cricket matches for free, which can be accessed on the go on all mobile networks.
"The combination of digital viewership of ICC World Cup cricket matches and rapidly growing 5G usage is likely to help Jio and Airtel exceed mobile data usage levels in Q3FY24," Rohan Dhamija, head (India and Middle East) at Analysys Mason, told ET.
Jio and Airtel reported sequential growth of 8% and 4.2% respectively in average monthly data usage per subscriber in the first quarter due to rapidly growing 5G usage. Vi also reported a sequential growth of 3.82% in data usage in the June quarter as more feature phone users upgraded to higher priced 4G packs to watch IPL live on smartphones.
