TRAI releases subscription data for July 2015; Bharti Airtel emerges as the biggest winner

TRAI has released their monthly Indian Telecom Subscription report, and according to the report, India now has a total of 1009.31 million telecom subscribers, out of which 983.21 are wireless (mobile) and 26.10 are wireline (landline).

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In July 2015, a total of 2.40 million new mobile subscribers were added, whereas wireline saw a fall of 0.05 million. Most of the new mobile subscriber additions came from urban areas. In wireless category, Bharti Airtel bagged most new users, while Idea Cellular is ranked second in this regard, and Reliance Communications became third best operator in attracting new users.

Mobile Subscriber Growth Highlights:

• With an increase of 2.40 million users in July 2015, total mobile subscriber base has reached to 983.21 million. India had 980.81 million subscribers by end of April 2015.
• In wireless segment, urban parts of India witnessed a monthly subscription increase of 0.77 percent or 4.34 million subscribers, while rural mobile subscriber base decreased by 0.46 percent or 1.93 million.
• Urban India has a total of 567.29 million mobile subscribers, while rural India has a total of 415.92 million mobile subscribers.
• Urban mobile subscriber share stands at 57.70 percent, while there are 42.30 percent rural subscribers.
• 3.98 million subscribers submitted their requests for MNP. Among these MNP requests, 0.21 million MNP requests were for inter-service area MNP.
• With this, the cumulative MNP requests increased from 163.93 million at the end of June 2015 to 167.91 million at the end of July 2015.
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Out of the total wireless subscriber base (983.21 million), 885.15 million wireless subscribers were active on the date of peak VLR in the month of July 2015. The proportion of active wireless subscribers was approximately 90.03 percent of the total wireless subscriber base.

Landline & Broadband:

• In the landline segment, subscriber base slipped to 26.10 million in July 2015 from 26.15 million in June 2015, registering a decline of 0.18 percent. The share of urban and rural subscribers in total wireline subscribers were 81.37 percent and 18.63 percent respectively at the end of July 2015.
• The overall wireline tele-density slightly declined from 2.08 in June 2015 to 2.07 in July 2015, with urban wireline tele-density and rural wireline tele-density being 5.43 and 0.56 respectively. BSNL and MTNL, the two PSU access service providers, held 74.31 percent of the wireline market share.
• The number of broadband subscribers increased from 108.85 million at the end of June 2015 to 113.32 million at the end of July 2015 with monthly growth rate of 4.10 percent.
• Top five service providers – Bharti Airtel (26.51 million), Vodafone (22.71 million), BSNL (18.43 million), Idea Cellular Ltd (17.43 million) and Reliance Communications Group (9.93 million) – constituted 83.83 percent of market share of the total broadband subscribers at the end of July 2015.

Operator Wise Wireless Subscriber Additions:

• Market leader Bharti Airtel bagged more new users than the rest of the operators. The company added over 1,008,743 users, while Idea Cellular ranked second by adding 6,79,796 users on its network.
• Reliance Communications added 534,068 new users making it third company to attract more users.
• Vodafone surprising added a much lower number (65,104) of subscribers.
• Among smaller operators, Aircel added 314,679 new users, while BSNL added 479,777 users. Tata DoCoMo added few users (142,969) after losing customers randomly since last few months. While two other companies, Videocon & MTNL added 201,519 & 22,212 users respectively.
• The worst performer by far has been Telenor (erstwhile Uninor), which lost a whopping 0.9 million subscribers. Sistema-owned MTS was the other who also witnessed negative growth.