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Subscribers per telecom operator and the number-portability counts that are a regulator's public churn number, from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India and Spain's competition and markets regulator, the CNMC.

India's monthly release carries broadband subscribers for Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea four to eight weeks before their quarterly subscriber and ARPU disclosures. The CNMC file states, per operator, how many mobile numbers were ported in and out each month since 2007: net ports are what a price war looks like before it reaches a quarterly report, for Telefonica, the MasOrange joint venture, Vodafone Spain and Digi.

Whole-market line counts are published beside the operators, so a line count can be read as a share of its market in one call.

Available Data Points:

• Period Date: The period the value describes — what the number is about (the valid clock).
• Published At: When the value first became knowable — when the publisher released it (the knowledge clock). Filter on this for anything where look-ahead bias would matter.
• Value: The numeric value, where the series has one.
• Value Text: The textual value, for categorical series such as a trial's status or phase.
• Unit: Unit of the value, e.g. vehicles, percent, USD.
• Value Type: number, percent, currency, count or text.
• Frequency: How often the publisher releases the series.
• Market: The market the reading describes — an ISO-3166 alpha-2 code (DE), a sub-national one (US-CA), a supranational aggregate (EA, EU) or GLOBAL.
• Series Slug: Which series the reading belongs to. Unique within a publisher, not globally.
• Series Name: Human-readable name of the series.
• Source Slug: Publisher/feed identifier, e.g. kba_registrations.
• Source Name: Human-readable name of the publisher or feed.
• Publisher: Who publishes the underlying data.
• Entity Ref: The publisher's own identifier for what the reading is about — a manufacturer name, a securitisation trust, a reactor unit, a country code. Kept so any value can be traced back to the row it was parsed from.

Coverage

TRAI: monthly, about 28 days after the month closes, releases back to 2008, covering the operators TRAI names in its top-five tables. CNMC: mobile, fixed and broadband lines and mobile portability per operator, monthly since January 2007, about seven weeks after the month.

MasOrange is half-owned by Orange, so its lines are a read-through rather than Orange's own subscribers. The Vodafone Spain rows changed owner to Zegona on 31 May 2024 without changing label.

What to look for

Read net portability first: ported-in less ported-out moves months before a subscriber base does, because a customer who has ported has already gone.

Read share and direction, not levels. Both markets are close to saturated, so the total barely moves and everything interesting is one operator taking subscribers from another. A merged operator's line count jumps on the merger date without a single customer having moved.

Two dates on every reading, and the difference is the edge

periodDate is what the number is about. publishedAt is when it first became knowable. The gap between them is the whole point of alternative data — and it is also the trap. A Form 10-D describing July is filed in mid-August, so a backtest that treats the period as the knowledge date reads a document six weeks before it existed.

from_date and to_date filter on periodDate, because that is the axis you plot against. Join on publishedAt when you are joining against returns.

Filtering: one market or all of them

Called with no filters, the endpoint returns every series in the dataset, for every market ORTEX covers it in. Each row names its own market, seriesSlug and sourceSlug, so a single request is enough to chart the whole dataset.

Narrow it with any combination of market (one market), series (one measure) and source (one publisher). Filter values that are each valid but select nothing together return 400 invalidSelection rather than a misleading empty result.

Raw readings here; comparable ones next door

This endpoint serves the publisher's numbers. Raw values are frequently not comparable — receivables of $10.9bn against $4.9bn say nothing without each book's size, and a 5.3% charge-off rate means something different on a subprime book than a prime one. The Alt Data signals endpoint serves the same series as percentiles and z-scores against a stated comparison set, which is the form a screen or a backtest wants.

Why a company you expect may be missing

Three reasons, and none of them is a bug:

• The dataset is a window, not a census: Several of these publishers release a rolling window rather than a complete history.
• The filer is not the listed company: Registers name a marque, a charter or a trust. ORTEX maps those to the listed parent where the link is defensible and leaves them unmapped where it is not — a wrong mapping silently attributes another company's data to your ticker.
• The population is genuinely narrow: Not every listed company appears in every register, and no amount of mapping changes that.

A series slug identifies a series within a publisher, not globally

unemployment_rate is published under that exact slug by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the UK Office for National Statistics and Statistics Canada. Where a slug names more than one series in a dataset, passing it alone returns 400 invalidSeries listing the alternatives — pair it with market or source. ORTEX would rather refuse than hand you one country's print labelled as another's.

How much history there is

Several of these publishers overwrite their own pages and keep no archive. Where that is so, the series begins on the day ORTEX started capturing it and lengthens from there — nobody, including the publisher, can supply the days before that. Everything ORTEX has ever fetched is archived on capture, so the series only ever grows.

Try it out! You can test the API with the trial key TEST. Simply include it in your request headers; either here, or add the header "Ortex-Api-Key": "TEST" to your http request.

Trial key restrictions: Trial keys may be limited to a specific date range and set of regions. Requests outside the allowed regions or entirely outside the allowed date range are rejected; a date window that partially overlaps the allowed range is trimmed to it, reported in meta.restriction.

Get full access! Get a key at app.ortex.com/apis