Mobile subscribers in India totaled 488.4 million at the end of October 2009, according to the latest monthly update by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI). The country added a record 16.67 million new wireless subscribers in the month of October, driven mainly by the newly introduced per second billing started by Tata. In September 2009, mobile operators signed up 15 million new users to reach 471.73 million subscribers. In 2009, India’s wireless subscriber base had increased at about 14 million new users a month.
For the third consecutive month in October, Tata Teleservices – 26 percent owned by Japan’s NTT DoCoMo, had the highest number of additions with 3.87 million new users (4 million the previous month), followed by Vodafone at 2.98 million (1.97 mil in September).
Bharti Airtel, India’s largest operator with about 23 percent market share in terms of subscriber base, added 2.7 million users in October as compared to 2.5 million in September 2009, while Aircel added 2.02 million subscribers.
Total broadband subscriber base increased by 2.49 per cent to 7.4 million in October 2009 from 7.22 million in the previous month.
| India – Mobile Subscribers | New (mil) | |||||
| Company | Subscribers(mil) | Oct-2009 | Sep-2009 | % mom | ||
| Bharti Airtel | 113.21 | 2.70 | 2.51 | 7.4 | ||
| Rcom | 88.21 | 2.10 | 2.01 | 4.6 | ||
| Vodafone Essar | 85.83 | 2.98 | 1.97 | 51.2 | ||
| BSNL | 59.43 | 0.68 | 1.45 | (53.5) | ||
| Idea Cellular | 53.35 | 1.9 | 1.19 | 42.6 | ||
| Tata Teleservices | 50.66 | 3.87 | 4.01 | (3.5) | ||
| Aircel | 27.7 | 2.02 | 1.31 | 53.7 | ||
| MTNL | 4.7 | 0.06 | 0.02 | 228.9 | ||
| Spice | 4.9 | 0.21 | 0.21 | (0.3) | ||
Source: TRAI
China had 7 million 3G users by the end of September 2009, according to the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and mobile phone users in China numbered 700 million.
China Mobile, the largest Chinese mobile operator with nearly 73 percent market share, added 5.1 million new users in October 2009 and its total subscriber base stood at 513,466,000. The number of G3 subscribers who used its 3G network services was 2,309,000. China Telecom added almost 3.1 million CDMA subs, taking its total to nearly 49.9 million. China Unicom added 801,000 new GSM subscribers to total nearly 143.6 million subscribers.
