India stayed firmly on course in the month of September as one of the world’s fastest growing mobile markets. The chatty South Asian country gained 10.07 million new mobile phone subscribers, versus 9.16 million net additions in August, out of which 7.69 million users were registered with GSM mobile operators.

In China, there were 7.89 million net mobile additions in September and total cellular subscriber base reached 624 million wireless users. China Telecom and Netcom added 730,000 and 607,000 new broadband users to total 42.2 million and 24.9 million subscribers respectively.

The rapid adoption of the ubiquitous cellphone has led to an estimated 84.5 million Chinese browsing the Internet on their handsets, which accounts for nearly 30% of the country’s 275 million netizens, according to a director of the Telecom Research Institute under the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Meanwhile, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) reported total wireless subscriber base in the country had reached 315.3 million, comprising 75% GSM market share, while there were 4.9 million broadband subscribers in India by the end of September 2008.

By end-September 2010, mobile subscriptions in India are projected to touch half a billion accounts, according to a recent report from Informa Telecoms & Media, and innovative mobile services are positioning themselves to ride the growth wave with India’s current 26% mobile penetration rate.

India’s cellular market leader, Bharti Airtel, added 2.7 million mobile users in September and its wireless subscribers totaled 77.48 million. Reliance Communications, the second largest Indian mobile operator, signed on 1.76 million new customers and had 56.05 million users in total. Vodafone Essar added 1.87 million new connections to reach 54.62 million subscribers.

Livemint reported that Airtel blazed a trail for Indian telecoms by edging into the world’s 25 most valuable telecom brands, a ranking compiled by UK-based Brand Finance. Other Asian carriers on the list include China Mobile ranked 5th, Japan’s NTT DoCoMo placed 9th and China Unicom in 17th position, among others.

Leading operator China Mobile gained 7.25 million new mobile phone subscribers in the month, boosting its share of the total Chinese mobile user base to 71.7%, up from 7.175 million subscribers in the prior month. The company’s subscriber base totaled 436 million at the end of September, up from 414.59 million a year earlier.

In the first 9 months of 2008, China Mobile’s profit grew by almost 38% year-on-year to reach RMB 82.59 billion (US$12.09 billion). Net additional subscribers rose to 66.78 million from 45.25 million. The volume of text messages generated by the company surged to 449.5 billion, up from 296.1 billion a year earlier.

The state-initiated Chinese telecom industry restructuring involving China Netcom and Unicom’s merger was completed during October, resulting in the new China Unicom (Hong Kong) Limited. China Unicom reported 640,000 mobile subscriber net additions and its GSM subscribers stood at 130.726 million at the end of September, up from 129.46 million at end-August.

China Telecom has officially acquired Unicom’s CDMA network and announced that it will launch combined CDMA and WiFi services in the first quarter of 2009.