Airtel Becomes Third-Largest Mobile Operator Globally

As per the latest data published by World Cellular Information Service, Bharti Airtel, with over 303 million mobile subscribers across its operations, has moved up one position in the global rankings.

China Mobile and Vodafone Group occupied the first and second positions respectively.

Bharti Airtel is a telecom service provider with operations in 20 countries across South Asia and Africa.

"This is a major landmark in the journey of Airtel and underlines the strength of our business model and our brand that is loved by customers across 20 countries," Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti Airtel, said.

"Today, we seamlessly manage global-scale operations in diverse geographies and deliver the same world-class services to each customer, this perhaps is one of our biggest achievements."

Bharti Airtel's mobile network covers over 1.85 billion people and carried over 1.23 trillion minutes of calls and over 333 petabytes of data in 2014-15.

Airtel has in the recent past been rolling out its 4G mobile and Internet services across the country, with trials in major cities including Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, and New Delhi.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) in June had released figures about the total telephone subscriber base at the end of April, and said Airtel's wireless subscriber base stood at 228.25 million. As per figures released by industry body COAI in June, Airtel's subscriber base at the end of May stood at 229.44 million.

Written with inputs from Ians