India's telephone subscriber base reaches 965 mn in June

Led by Bharti Airtel, telecom operators added 4.73 million new mobile phone users in the month of June 2012, taking the telephone subscriber base in the country to 965.52 million, telecom regulator Trai on Friday said.

With this addition, the total mobile phone user base in India stood at 934.09 million at the end of the reported month, while that of landline users stood at 31.43 million, data released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India showed.

The overall teledensity (telephones per 100 people) in India reached 76.99 per cent in June. Bharti Airtel added the most subscribers at over 2 million, taking its subscriber base to 187.3 million at the end of June.

Vodafone saw the second highest addition at 1.22 million users in the month, taking its userbase to 153.7 million.

Tata Teleservices, on the other hand, lost a whopping 1.31 million users in June, bringing its user base down to 64.87 million as of June 30, 2012.

Idea Cellular added 1.19 million new users, while Aircel added 0.48 million, taking the subscriber base to 117.1 million and 64.87

million, respectively.

Even after cancellation of licences, Uninor continued to grow its subscriber base strongly with addition of 0.5 million new users. Its subscriber base stood at 45.57 million at the end of June 2012.

Reliance Communications added 0.54 million users, while Sistema Shyam Teleservices (which has also lost its licences) added over 0.28 million users in the reported month.

State-owned BSNL and MTNL added 0.56 million and 11,224 new users, taking their subscriber base to 98.27 million and 5.56 million, respectively.

Wireline subscriber base declined from 31.53 million at the end of May 2012 to 31.43 million at the end of June 2012.

Total broadband subscriber base has increased to 14.50 million in June 2012 from 14.31 million in the previous month. June, 4.16 million requests have been made for Mobile Number Portability for shifting on to network of other operator.