Telephone users decline to 89.98 crore at September end: Trai

Telephone subscribers in the country declined to 89.98 crore at September-end from 90.30 crore at the end of June, sectoral regulator Trai said today.

"The number of telephone subscribers in India decreased from 903.09 million at the end of June to 899.86 million at the end of September," Trai said in its performance indicator report for the quarter ended September 2013.

On a yearly basis, there was a decline of 4.03 per cent. The user base at the end of September 2012 stood at 93.77 crore.

Wireless subscribers (GSM and CDMA) declined to 87.05 crore at the end of September from 87.33 crore in June and the wireline base dropped to 2.92 crore from 2.97 crore.
GSM subscribers, however, grew by 0.69 per cent to 80.76 crore at the end of September as against 80.21 crore at the end of June. The CDMA subscriber base declined 11.7 per cent to 6.29 crore from 7.12 crore.

GSM users constituted 92.77 per cent of the wireless market, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said.

Trai said Bharti Airtel remained the leading operator with 19.33 crore subscribers, followed by Vodafone with 15.55 crore and Idea with 12.72 crore users.

"Airtel has added the highest number of subscribers at 2.47 million, followed by Aircel (2.28 million) while Reliance Communications has the maximum net loss of 9.47 million subscribers during this quarter," it said.

There there were 2.21 crore Internet subscribers, excluding users accessing the Internet through mobile devices.

"In the month of September 2013, 188.2 million subscribers accessed Internet through mobile devices, as per the information received from 12 service providers," it said.
The average revenue per user (ARPU) of GSM operators declined to Rs 109 for the quarter from Rs 111 in the June quarter, whereas the ARPU of CDMA players fell to Rs 98.22 from Rs 98.35.

Gross revenue and adjusted gross revenue of the telecom service sector for the quarter ended September were Rs 57,452.56 crore and Rs 38,810.56 crore, respectively, it added.