Mobile phone subscriber base inches to 929.37 million, Airtel leads

Total subscriber base stood at 960.9 million and overall teledensity (telephones per 100 people) in India reached 79.28 percent in May.

Bharti Airtel added the most over 2 million subscribers, taking its subscriber base to 185.3 million at the end of May.

Idea Cellular saw the second highest addition at 1.75 million users in the month.

Even after cancellation of licences, Uninor retained third position by adding over 1.52 million users. Vodafone regained its fourth position in terms of new subscribers addition by adding 1.2 million users.

Aircel, Reliance Communications, Sistema Shyam added over 0.8 million, 0.5 million and 0.25 million users respectively.

State-owned BSNL and MTNL continued to lose subscribers in May. BSNL lost 81,000 and MTNL 0.17 million users in May. In April, BSNL and MTNL lost around 0.71 million and 0.1 million users respectively from their network. BSNL and MTNL's total subscriber base stood at 97.71 million and 5.55 million, respectively.

Tata Teleservices, which had lost 0.51 million users in April, turned positive by adding over 0.3 million new users in May.

Wireline subscriber base declined by 0.36 percent from 31.89 million in April 2012 to 31.53 million at the end of May. Total broadband subscriber base has increased from 13.95 million in April to 14.31 million at the end of May 2012, there by showing a 0monthly growth of 2.6 percent. The data released by Telecom Regulatory Authority of India shows that by the end of May 2012 about 4.2 million new subscribers submitted their requests to different service providers for shifting on to network of other operator using Mobile Number Portability facility.