India now has 851.7 mn mobile phones

NEW DELHI, INDIA: India, a country of 1.2 billion people, now has 851.7 million mobile phone subscribers, with 11.41 million connections added in June, according to official data released Monday.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) said the wireless user base grew 1.36 percent, from 840.28 million in May.

While the share of urban subscribers declined to 66 per cent from 66.02 per cent, the share of rural subscribers marginally increased from 33.98 per cent to 34 per cent, the report said Monday.

With this, the total number of telephone subscriber base touched 885.99 million, registering a growth of 1.29 per cent.

Overall teledensity in India reached 73.97.

However, of the total 851.70 million wireless subscribers in March, only 594.77 million were active subscribers on the date of peak visitor location register (VLR).

VLR is a temporary database of the subscribers who have roamed into the particular area which it serves. Each base station in the network is served by exactly one VLR, hence a subscriber cannot be present in more than one VLR at a time.

The growth in this category was led by telecom giant Bharti Airtel, which added 2.12 million users to take its subscriber base to 169.19 million users.

Reliance Communications followed next with an addition of 2.1 million new subscribers, taking its subscriber base to 143.27 million.

Vodafone added 2.1 million subscribers to take its total number of customers to 141.5 million.

Idea Cellular added 1.36 million subscribers, increasing its subscribers count to 95.1 million while Uninor added 9,43,924 million subscribers to have 26.33 million subscribers.

According to the data, the broadband subscriber base grew 1.64 percent from 12.12 million in May to 12.32 million in June 2011.

However, the wireline segment declined marginally from 34.4 million in May to 34.29 million at the end of June.