India's mobile subscriber base rises to 929.37 million: TRAI

05-07-2012

India's total mobile subscriber base rose by over 8 million to 929.37 million in May 2012, says the latest data released by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). The mobile subscribers base in April 2012 was 921.02 million, thus posting a 0.91 percent growth.

According to the data, the total subscriber base is around 960.9 million, whereas overall teledensity (telephones per 100 people) in India reached 79.28 percent in May.

Among the operators, Bharti Airtel led the way with addition of two million new subscribers, raising its subscriber base to 185.3 million as on May 2012. Idea Cellular stood second with 1.75 million new subscribers in that month.

In spite of cancellation of licence, Uninor managed to secure the third position by adding more than 1.52 million users. Vodafone is now in the fourth position, adding 1.2 million users.

State-run telcos BSNL and MTNL continued to lose subscribers in May. While BSNL lost 81,000 subscribers, MTNL lost 0.17 million. It may be recalled that the two telcos had also lost a large number of subscribers in April 2012. Read our previous subscriber base report here.

Brand-wise net addition

Mobile Number Portability

As per the data reported by the service providers, by the end of May 2012 about 50.16 million subscribers have submitted their requests to different service providers for porting their mobile number. Previous TRAI report on MNP had revealed that the portability requests had increased to 45.89 million at the end of April 2012, up from 41.88 million in March. Check out the status of MNP requests in various service areas in the table below:

MNP status as on May 2012

Broadband

According to the telecom regulatory body, the total number of broadband users in the country has risen from 13.95 million (as on April 2012) to 14.31 million at the end of May 2012, overall a growth of 2.60 percent. In terms of annual growth, broadband subscribers base rose by 18.06 percent during the last one year (June 2011 to May 2012).

Broadband market share