Mobile cos add 9.8 million users in January

New Delhi: Telecom operators added 9.88 million mobile subscribers in January, taking the total telephone user base in the country to 936.12 million, sectoral regulator Trai said today.

India's mobile subscriber base increased to 903.73 million in January, up from 893.84 million in the preceding month, registering a growth of 1.11 per cent, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) said in a statement.

The overall teledensity (telephones per 100 people) in India reached 77.57 per cent.

However, the number of active mobile subscribers, according to the visitor location register (VLR) data, was 659.97 million on the date of Peak VLR for the month of January 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 growth in the wireless category was led by Uninor, which added 2.49 million users, taking its total subscriber base to 38.79 million.

It was followed by Idea Cellular, which added 1.74 million new users to take its subscriber base to 108.12 million.

The country's largest operator Airtel added 1.3 million subscribers and its base was 176.95 million users.

Reliance Communications and Vodafone added 0.94 million and 0.85 million new customers to take their subscriber base to 151.02 million and 148.60 million, respectively.

State-owned telcos BSNL and MTNL added 0.87 million and 57,564 new users in January. Their subscriber base stood at 97.63 million and 5.73 million, respectively.

Aircel, Tata Teleservices and Sistema Shyam added 0.81 million, 0.22 million and 0.14 million new subscribers, respectively.

Wireline subscriber base declined from 32.69 million at the end of December 2011 to 32.39 million at the end of January 2012. BSNL and MTNL hold 80.91 per cent of the wireline market share.

Broadband subscriber base increased from 13.30 million at the end of December 2011 to 13.42 million at the end of January this year.

The number of requests from subscribers to change their operators under the Mobile Number Portability (MNP) facility stood at 3.55 million in January.

In MNP Zone-I (Northern and Western India) maximum number of requests were received in Gujarat (3.04 million), followed by Rajasthan (2.72 million).

In MNP Zone-II (Southern and Eastern India) maximum number of requests were received in Karnataka (3.40 million), followed by Andhra Pradesh (3.04 million).