India's mobile subscriber base crosses 840 mn
The number of mobile phone subscribers in India rose to 840.28 million in May with Anil Ambani-led Reliance Communications alone adding 2.5 million subscribers, official data showed Thursday.
According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the wireless user base grew 1.61 percent with an addition of 13.35 million subscribers, from 826 million in April.
With this, the total number of telephone subscribers, including land line holders, touched 874.68 million, registering a growth of 1.53 percent.
Overall teledensity in India reached 73.11.
However, of the total 840.28 million wireless subscribers, only 588.13 million subscribers 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 total number of subscribers of Reliance Communications stood at 141.16 million. Bharti Airtel and Vodafone added 2.45 million subscribers each to take their subscribers base to 167.07 million and 139.43 million respectively.
Idea Cellular added 1.8 million subscribers, increasing its subscribers count to 93.75 million while Uninor added 1.14 million subscribers to have 25.39 million subscribers.
According to the data, the broadband subscriber base grew 0.92 percent from 12.01 million in April to 12.12 million in May 2011. However, the wireline segment declined marginally from 34.55 million in April to 34.40 million at the end of May 2011.
