India Added 20.2M Mobile Users In March 2011: TRAI

In March 2011, the country added 20.21 million wireless users and it now has 811.59 million users. The share of rural subscribers has increased to 33.70% and overall mobile teledensity in India is now at 67.98%.

India has a total of 846.32 million telecom (wireless and landline) users as of March 2011, up from 826.25 million in February 2011. The overall teledensity is 70.89%. While the urban populace constitutes 66.65% of the total telecom base, rural users form 33.35%.

Bharti Airtel's market share is now 19.99%, followed by Reliance Communications at 16.72% and Vodafone at 16.58%. In March, Vodafone Essar added 3.64 million subscribers, taking its total to 134.5 million, compare to other operators. BSNL has 11.32% while Tata Teleservices has 10.98% market share while Idea Cellular has 11.03%.

According to TRAI, the total broadband subscriber base rose from 11.47 Million in February 2011 to 11.87 Million in March 2011. TRAI defines broadband as any Internet connection offering download speeds at or greater than 256 Kbps.

Landline user base continues to slide, from 34.87 million at the end of February 2011 to 34.73 million in March 2011.

Mobile number portability, which allows subscribers to switch from one operator to another without changing their number, has also made a mark in the telecom arena, with 6.42 million  subscribers opting to port their number.

This is up from 3.83 million subscribers reported at the end of February 2011, who chose MNP.

The maximum number of requests were received in Gujarat -- 0.617 million subscribers chose MNP, followed by Rajasthan with 0.549 million. In Zone-II (Southern & Eastern India) the maximum number of requests received were in Karnataka -- 0.52 million subscribers followed by Tamil Nadu with 0.47 million.

The official TRAI press release can be downloaded from here.