Telecom Service Providers Add 7.44 Million Users in Feb

Bangalore: Telecom operators added 7.44 million mobile subscribers in February, taking the total telephone user base in the country to 943.49 million, sectoral regulator TRAI said.

The growth was led by Idea Cellular , which added 2.58 million new subscribers, taking the total mobile phone base in the country to 911.17 million in February.

This is 0.82% higher than the preceding month, when the total mobile user base stood at 903.73 million.

Uninor, whose 22 licences were cancelled by a Supreme Court judgement on February 2, saw the second highest addition at 2.34 million new users.

Sistema Shyam Teleservices, Videocon and Loop, whose licences were also cancelled, added 2.31 lakh, 3.48 lakh and 11,426 new users, respectively.

The overall teledensity (telephones per 100 people) in India reached 78.10 percent in February.

However, the number of active mobile subscribers, according to the visitor location register (VLR) data, was 670.65 million on the date of Peak VLR for the month of February 2012.

VLR numbers provide details on active customers at any given point of time, excluding switched-off and out-of-the- coverage area customers.

The country's largest operator Airtel added 1.82 million subscribers and its users base stood at 178.77 million.

Reliance Communications and Vodafone added 0.97 million and 0.83 million new customers to take their subscriber base to 152 million and 149.44 million, respectively.

State-owned BSNL and MTNL added 0.11 million and 34,988 new users in February, respectively. Their subscriber base stood at 97.75 million and 5.77 million, respectively.

Aircel added 0.79 million new subscribers, while Tata Teleservices lost 1.83 million subscribers in the reported period.

Wireline subscriber base declined from 32.39 million at the end of January to 32.33 million at the end of February 2012. BSNL and MTNL hold 80.76 per cent of the wireline market share.

Broadband subscriber base increased from 13.42 million at the end of January to 13.54 million at February-end.

The number of requests from subscribers to change their operators under the Mobile Number Portability (MNP) facility stood at 4.32 million in February.

In MNP Zone-I (Northern and Western India), maximum number of requests were received in Gujarat (3.42 million), followed by Rajasthan (3.26 million).

In MNP Zone-II (Southern and Eastern India), maximum number of requests were received in Karnataka (3.94 million), followed by Andhra Pradesh (3.46 million).