India's mobile user base declines to 103.42 crore in July:Trai

The country's mobile user base declined marginally to 103.42 crore at the end of July this year from 103.51 crore in June, primarily due to operators like Reliance and Tata Teleservices losing subscribers.
Total telecom customer base (wireless and wireline) at the end of July stood at 105.88 crore, down 1.01 per cent from 105.98 crore at the end of June 2016, sectoral regulator TRAI said today.
This is not the first time that telecom base in the country has seen a month-on-month decline. In the month of May, the mobile userbase had shrunk 1.1 per cent, while the overall subscriber base had fallen 1.26 per cent compared to the base in April.

The overall tele-density -- described as number of people with phones per 100 people -- in India declined from 83.20 at the end of June to 83.04 at the end of July, 2016.
TRAI said the wireline (landline) userbase fell 0.13 per cent to 2.46 crore at the end of July 2016.
Reliance Communications lost a whopping 32.4 lakh customers, while Tata Teleservices and Sistema lost 6,96,325 and 2,28,626 subscribers, respectively in the said month.

Bharti Airtel led the growth tally with a net addition of 10.7 lakh new mobile customers, taking its total subscriber base to 25.68 crore.
Vodafone added 3,26,248 new subscribers, taking its total base to 19.97 crore, while Idea added 2,56,170 new users taking its subscriber base to 17.64 crore at the end of July, 2016.

Aircel added 4,03,603 new users and Telenor added 19,049 users, while state-run telcos -- BSNL and MTNL -- added 1.17 million and 6,730 users in the said month.
The number of broadband subscribers increased to 16.69 crore at the end of July from 15.98 crore in June. Of these, 14.89 crore were mobile devices users (phones and dongles), while 1.75 crore were wired subscribers and 5.4 lakh used fixed wireless (WiFi, WiMax, Point-to-Point Radio and VSAT), TRAI said.