It sounds like a simple question, but subscriber numbers have become increasingly difficult to compare. Some operators include Machine-to-Machine (M2M) and Internet of Things (IoT) SIMs in their reported mobile totals, while others report them separately. Some include fixed wireless access connections, and multinational groups sometimes quote subscriber numbers from associates in which they own only a minority stake.
With IoT connections now running into billions globally, simply taking the headline numbers can produce a rather misleading league table.
We have therefore attempted a slightly different comparison: the world's largest mobile operators and operator groups by mobile subscriber numbers, excluding M2M and IoT connections as far as the published data allows.
The figures use the latest information available at the end of August 2026, generally June or July 2026. They should be treated as approximate because reporting methodologies are not standardised between operators.
Rank Operator / Group Mobile subscribers excluding M2M/IoT
1 China Mobile ~1.011 billion
2 Bharti Airtel ~594 million
3 Reliance Jio ~479 million
4 China Telecom 442 million
5 China Unicom >357 million
6 MTN Group 318 million
7 América Móvil ~300 million
8 Vodafone Group 279 million
9 Orange Group ~261 million
10 e& ~245 million
China Mobile remains in a league of its own. At the end of June 2026, the operator had approximately 1.011 billion mobile customers. What makes the distinction particularly important is that China Mobile also had 1.511 billion IoT card connections. Those IoT connections are reported separately and are therefore not included in the figure above.
The scale difference is remarkable. China Mobile has more IoT connections than it has human mobile subscribers, and its mobile customer base alone is almost twice the size of the next operator group.
Bharti Airtel takes second place when its Indian and African businesses are combined. The latest TRAI figures show Airtel with around 489.5 million wireless connections in India, but approximately 84.45 million of these are M2M connections. Removing these gives just over 405 million Indian consumer mobile subscriptions. Airtel Africa reported another 189 million customers at the end of June 2026, producing a combined figure of roughly 594 million.
This illustrates why simply using operator headline subscriber numbers can be problematic. India now has 137.7 million cellular M2M connections, and TRAI explicitly states that its wireless subscriber figures include M2M connections.
The same adjustment changes the picture for Reliance Jio. TRAI reported around 506 million wireless connections for Jio at the end of July, but 26.56 million were M2M connections. That leaves approximately 479 million conventional mobile subscriptions, putting Jio comfortably in third place rather than above Airtel when Airtel's African operations are included.
Jio itself reports a much larger overall customer base of more than 533 million because its broader digital services reporting also reflects the rapid expansion of its fixed broadband and JioAirFiber businesses. This is another reason why company-level customer numbers cannot always be compared directly with mobile subscriber numbers.
The next two positions belong to China's other major state-owned operators.
China Telecom reported 442.43 million mobile subscribers at the end of June 2026, including 322.5 million 5G network subscribers. China's enormous mobile IoT population is counted separately from conventional mobile telephone users in national statistics.
China Unicom is slightly more difficult. Its 2025 annual report said that the number of mobile billing subscribers had exceeded 357 million. More recent reporting increasingly uses a much broader "connectivity subscribers" measure combining mobile, broadband, IoT and other connections, so I have retained the latest clean mobile-only figure rather than trying to derive a misleading number from the new KPI.
Africa's largest operator group, MTN, comes next. MTN reported 317.7 million active subscribers across 19 markets at the end of June 2026. More than 179 million of these were active data users.
América Móvil, owner of brands including Claro, Telcel and A1, reported 334.3 million wireless lines at the end of June. The difficulty is that this figure includes M2M subscriptions in several operations. For example, its Austria and Eastern Europe total alone includes 11.28 million A1 Digital M2M subscriptions, while Claro Brazil also reports substantial M2M additions. Once these are removed, I estimate the conventional mobile base to be around 300 million.
This estimate is necessarily less precise than the China Mobile or Vodafone figures because América Móvil does not publish a single group-wide mobile total excluding M2M.
Vodafone Group is much cleaner. Its 2026 annual report gives 279 million mobile customers while separately reporting 244 million IoT connections. This makes Vodafone one of the easiest multinational operators to compare for this exercise.
Orange reported 321.3 million mobile accesses at the end of June 2026, boosted significantly by the full consolidation of MasOrange in Spain. Its detailed KPI reporting includes M2M within parts of the mobile base, and removing those connections brings the conventional mobile total to roughly 261 million. Orange's Africa and Middle East business alone now serves around 180 million mobile customers, showing how important that region has become to the Group.
Finally comes e&, formerly Etisalat Group. Its aggregate subscriber base reached 251.5 million at the end of June 2026 following the consolidation of businesses including Telenor Pakistan and its expanded international portfolio. The headline figure contains a relatively small number of fixed subscribers as well as mobile connections, so a reasonable mobile-only estimate is around 245 million.
The bottom of the table is the least certain. Deutsche Telekom is very close to the top-ten boundary, but producing a comparable 2026 group mobile subscriber figure is now difficult. T-Mobile US changed its reporting in the first quarter of 2026 and now emphasises postpaid accounts rather than total customers. At the end of 2025 it had 142.4 million US customers, while Deutsche Telekom currently reports another 123.7 million mobile customers across Germany and its other European operations. However, the German figure explicitly includes substantial M2M SIMs, particularly automotive connections.
Depending on exactly how M2M, broadband and other non-phone connections are treated, Deutsche Telekom and e& could therefore exchange places around the tenth position.
Another operator group that can appear much larger in some rankings is Singtel. This is largely because Singtel has major investments in operators including Bharti Airtel, Telkomsel, AIS and Globe. Adding all of their subscribers to Singtel's total while also ranking those operators or groups separately would effectively count the same subscribers more than once. For this comparison, I have therefore concentrated on controlled operator businesses rather than attributing 100% of associate subscribers to their shareholders.
The exercise also highlights how dramatically the meaning of a "mobile connection" is changing.
China Mobile alone has more than 1.5 billion IoT connections. Vodafone has 244 million IoT connections, while India's M2M base has already reached almost 138 million. In many cases, an operator's total number of network connections is therefore substantially larger than the number of people actually using its mobile services.
For traditional mobile subscriber scale, however, the picture remains clear. China and India dominate the top of the global rankings, followed by large multi-country groups across Africa, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East.
And China Mobile, with more than one billion conventional mobile customers before its enormous IoT business is even counted, remains comfortably the largest mobile operator in the world.
Related Posts:
- Operator Watch Blog: A Billion for China and China Mobile
- Operator Watch Blog: World's Largest Mobile Networks by Data Traffic - Q1 2024
- Operator Watch Blog: 8.05 Billion Mobile Subscribers with 5.22 Billion Unique by End of 2020
- Operator Watch Blog: World's Largest Mobile Networks by Data Traffic - March 2021
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