Offering dollops of data to attract data subscribers might return to haunt India’s top three telcos – Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone Idea – as revenues remain a relative straggler to data usage.

Case in point: while the just-ended cricket World Cup may have boosted mobile data usage by over 4% sequentially in the December quarter for the top three telcos, that will translate only into relatively modest sequential revenue growth — at best 1 percent — since consumers invariably have large hunks of unused data, precluding mass upgrades to higher-value plans.

Furthermore, some of the digital viewing of World Cup action on smartphones was via WiFi and not mobile data.

But the saving grace this quarter is likely to be the festive season and the slew of assembly elections in multiple states (Rajasthan, Chattisgarh, MP, and Mizoram), coupled with 5G user additions by Jio and Airtel and extra days during the October-December period, Economic Times reported.

This, analysts, estimate could potentially boost overall data usage levels by almost 7-8 percent sequentially, which, in turn, could drive around 3-3.5 percent sequential growth in sectoral India mobile revenues during the current quarter.