1.85 mn new mobile users in April, Bharti leads

The total mobile subscriber base in the country grew marginally to 952.91 million in April from 951.34 million in March with net addition of 1.85 million users, according to data released by sectoral regulator Trai on Wednesday.

In March, net addition of mobile services subscribers was 8 million. The impact of licence cancellation and some telecom companies closing down their operations were visible on the telecom subscriber addition numbers, said analysts.

Around 4.22 million users were affected as Etisalat DB, Loop Telecom and S-Tel closed their operations in the country.

In April, the industry added over 7.4 million users but lost around 5.5 million mobile subscribers as well – leading to a net addition of 1.85 million.

The growth in subscribers was led by country's largest operator Bharti Airtel that added over 2 million new subscribers, taking its total subscriber base to 183.29 million at the end of the month.

Idea Cellular saw the second highest addition at 1.48 million new users in April.

Uninor, whose licences has been cancelled, stood at third position with a net addition of over 1.11 million users.

Aircel, which lost 0.68 million user in March, added over 1 million new user in April.

Reliance Communications, Vodafone, Sistema Shyam Teleservices and Videocon added 0.5 million, 0.81 million, 0.2 million and 0.15 million new users, respectively.

State-owned BSNL and MTNL lost subscribers in April. BSNL, which added 0.76 million users in March, lost around 0.71 million users to its network.

MTNL lost around 0.1 million users during the month which higher than 58,681 new users it had added in March.

BSNL and MTNL's total subscriber base stood at 97.79 million and 5.73 million, respectively. Tata Teleservices also lost 0.51 million users from its network in April.

Meanwhile, the overall teledensity (telephones per 100 people) in India reached 78.71 per cent in April.

Wireline subscriber base declined 0.28 per cent to 31.89 million at the end of April, 2012. Broadband subscriber base increased from 13.79  million at the end of March to 13.95 million in April.

The data released by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India shows that by the end of April 2012 about 45.89 million subscribers have submitted their requests to different service providers for shifting to network of other operator using Mobile Number Portability facility.