New Delhi, July 5 (IANS) The number of mobile phone subscribers in India rose to 929.37 million in May with Bharti Airtel alone signing two million new subscribers, says official data.
According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) data released Wednesday evening, with an addition of 8.35 million subscribers, the wireless user base grew 0.91 percent in May from 921.02 million in April.
With this, the total number of telephone subscribers, including land line holders, touched 960.90 million, registering a growth of 0.84 percent.
Overall teledensity in India reached 79.28 percent.
However, of the total 929.37 million wireless subscribers, only 689.33 million subscribers were active on the date of peak visitor location register (VLR).
The total active VLR number excludes the CDMA VLR figure of BSNL, as the service provider has not provided the VLR figures of their total CDMA subscriber base of 3.59 million, TRAI said.
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 Bharti Airtel stood at 185.3 million. Idea Cellular added 1.76 million subscribers to take its subscribers count to 115.97 million.
Uninor added 1.5 customers taking its subscribers base to 45 million while Vodafone added 1.2 million users increasing its subscribers count to 152.5 million.
Aircel added 8,06,149 subscribers to have total number of 64.4 million users. Reliance Communications added 5,07,597 subscribers to take its user base to 154 million.
State-owned Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) and Mahanagar Telephone Nigam Ltd (MTNL) on the other hand lost 81,809 and 1,71,951 users respectively to have 97.7 million and 5.6 million users.
According to the data, the broadband subscriber base reached 14.31 million in May from 13.95 in April. However, the wireline segment declined marginally from 31.89 million in April to 31.53 million in May.
