The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has released the subscriber data for the month of May 2017. The total of telecom subscribers in India (both wired and wireless) increased from 1198.9 million at the end of April 2017 to 1204.98 million at the end of May 2017.
Overall, the subscriber addition showed a monthly growth of 0.51% from April to May. Digging into the report, the urban subscription increased from 695.99 million at the end of April 2017 to 697.06 million at the end of May 2017, and the Rural subscription increased from 502.90 million to 507.92 million during the same period. The monthly growth rates of urban and rural subscription were 0.15% and 1.00% respectively during the month of May 2017.
Wireless Subscribers
The total wireless subscribers (GSM, CDMA and LTE) increased from 1174.60 million to 1180.82 million at the end of May 2017, registering a growth of 0.53%.
The Wireless subscription in urban areas increased from 675.48 million 676.65 million at the end of May 2017, and wireless subscription in rural areas also increased from 499.12 million to 504.18 million during the same period. The monthly growth rates of urban and rural wireless subscription were 0.17% and 1.01% respectively.
According to the report, the Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio continues to add the subscribers at a rapid pace by adding more than 4.7 million new customers. That said, Reliance Jio itself contributes 75 percent of overall net subscriber addition in the mobile services segment.
Bharti Airtel stands second on the list with 2.09 million new customers, while BSNL has added 1.35 million new subscribers, followed by Vodafone India with 1.3 million and Idea Cellular 0.19 million.
Mobile Number Portability
Coming to the Mobile Number Portability (MNP) department, the TRAI has received an excess of 5.3 million MNP requests in May 2017, up from the 4.96 million it received in April 2017. "With this, the cumulative MNP requests increased from 277.72 million at the end of Apr-17 to 283.09 million at the end of May-17, since the implementation of MNP," says the TRAI report.
In April 2017, TRAI received the lowest MNP request number of just 4.96 million, which is probably the least number it received in recent times. But this month, the regulator received a total of 5,367,114 requests.
In MNP Zone-I (Northern and Western India), the highest number of requests till date have been received in Rajasthan (about 23.82 million) followed by Gujarat (about 20.28 million). In MNP Zone-II (Southern and Eastern India), the highest number of requests till date have been received in Karnataka (about 30.86 million) followed by Andhra Pradesh (about 25.49 million).
