India’s Mobile Base Nears A Billion

New Delhi: The number of mobile phone subscribers in India rose to 919.17 million in March with Bharti Airtel alone signing 2.5 million of the 8 million new subscribers, official data showed Thursday.

According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the wireless user base grew 0.88 percent with an addition of 8 million subscribers, from 911.17 million in February.

With this, the total number of telephone subscribers, including land line holders, touched 951.34 million, registering a growth of 0.83 percent. Overall teledensity in India reached 78.66 percent.

However, of the total 919.17 million wireless subscribers, only 683.02 million subscribers were active subscribers on the date of peak visitor location register (VLR) — a temporary database of the subscribers who have roamed into the particular area, which it serves.

Each base station in the network is served by exactly one VLR, hence a subscriber cannot be present in more than one VLR at a time.

The total number of subscribers of Bharti Airtel stood at 181.3 million. Idea Cellular added 2 million to take its total subscribers base to 112.72 million.

Uninor added 1.3 million customers taking its subscribers base to 42.4 million while Reliance Communications added 1 million users increasing its subscribers count to 153 million susbscribers.

Vodafone also added one 1 million subscribers to have a total number of 150.5 subscribers.

State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) added 7,61,794 and 58,681 users to have 98.5 million and 5.8 million users respectively.

According to the data, the broadband subscriber base grew 1.86 percent from 13.54 million in February to 13.79 million in March. However, the wireline segment declined marginally from 32.33 million in February to 32.17 million in March.

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