New Delhi: Bharti Airtel Monday said its customer base has crossed the 50-million mark to make it the 10th largest player in the global telecom industry.

It also announced its foray into direct-to-home (DTH) business by yearend.

"Our next target is to reach the 100-million mark by 2010," the company's chief executive Manoj Kohli said at a press conference here, adding that the wireless segment contributed 96 percent of the total base with 47.99 million customers.

"Most subscribers from the next 50 million would come from rural areas," he said. The company has plans to take its network to 500,000 villages and towns by 2010, covering 95 percent of the country's population.

The company, promoted by the Delhi-based industrialist Sunil Bharti Mittal, said it had a customer base of 25 million last year and has been adding around two million customers to its network every month.

Gupta said the company was confident it would maintain its growth in mobile services, even though he admitted that revenue per subscriber might go down due to the focus on rural areas.

Regarding the DTH television service, he said Bharti Airtel intended to make the necessary investment to make it operational by end of this fiscal, but declined to give further details.

He also said that the company would start its operations in Sri Lanka by end of this fiscal. An investment of $200 million has already been committed to the project.