According to the latest TRAI report, India’s wireless subscriber base decreased from 934.09 million in June 2012 to 913.49 million at the end of July 2012, registering the first time a negative growth of -2.21%. This decline is due to large-scale disconnection of inactive mobile users who have not used their phones for two months or more, by some telecom service providers like Reliance Communication and Tata Teleservices.
Reliance Communication(RCom) losses 13.25% of their mobile subscribers, which is around 2,048,8915 million mobile subscribers. The decrease is mainly due to the disconnection of inactive mobile users. RCom total mobile subscribers fell to 134.1 million mobile subscribers at the end of July, from 154.6 million in the previous month, thus losing its position of 2nd largest telecom provider in India to 3rd rank by subscriber base. Tata Docomo followed RCOm with losing 2.4 million mobile subscribers, Uninor losing 1.08million customers, followed by Videocon, MTNL and Loop mobile.
Bharti Airtel hold the top telecom operator in India with 20.67% market share, an increase of 1.5 million telecom subscribers making the total subscriber base to 188 million. Vodafone takes the second spot with 16.96% share and RCom in the third place with 14.68% share. Private operators hold 88.60% of the wireless market share in India (based on subscriber base) where as BSNL and MTNL, the two PSU operators hold only 11.40% market share.
The number of telephone subscribers in India decreased to 944.81 million at the end of July, 2012 from 965.52 million at the end of June 2012, thereby registering a monthly growth rate of -2.14%. The share of urban subscribers has declined to 63.83% from 64.40% whereas share of rural subscribers has increased to 36.17% in the month of July 2012.
As per the data reported by the service providers on MNP, by the end of July 2012 about 59.31 million subscribers have submitted their requests to different service providers for porting their mobile number. Karnataka accounted for 7.19 million MNP request followed by Andhra Pradesh (5.72million) and Gujarat (5.34 million).
Broadband segment is showing a monthly growth of 1.20%, with total Broadband subscriber base in India increasing from 14.50 million at the end of June 2012 to 14.68 million at the end of July 2012. There are 156 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) which are providing broadband services in the country. BSNL topping the chat with 9.36 million broadband subscribers (63.7 % market share) followed by Bharti Airtel with 1.37 million subscribers (9.3%) and MTNL with 1.08 million subscribers (7.3%).
To know more read the complete TRAI telecom report highlights the Telecom Subscription Data as on 31st July 2012 here.