Telecom subscriber base falls marginally to 1,058 million

Telecom subscriber base declined by 1.26 million in May to 1,058.03 million after Videocon shut its mobile business and Reliance Communications disconnected CDMA customers from its network.
"The number of telephone subscribers in India declined from 1,059.29 million at the end of April to 1,058.03 million at the end of May," the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India said in its subscriber report for May.
While landline or fixed line connections continued to decline, the overall mobile subscriber base in the country fell 1.1 million to 1,033.16 million in May, from 1,034.25 million in April.
This was mainly due to Videocon Telecom selling its mobile spectrum to Airtel and its customer base becoming nil from 5.1 million in April.

On the other hand, RCom started 4G services and disconnected its CDMA network for those who did not opt for upgrade to the premium mobile service. The company's subscriber base came down 1.15 million to 101.3 million, largely due to this disconnection.
Tata Teleservices and Sistema Shyam also lost 1,91,235 and 4,044 mobile customers, respectively.

The effect of customer loss was mitigated to some extent by customer addition by Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular, BSNL, Vodafone, Telenor, Aircel and MTNL.
Bharti Airtel led the chart by adding 2.11 million new mobile customers. It was followed by Idea, which added 8,58,576 customers, BSNL 7,53,689, Vodafone 6,88,531, Telenor 6,29,259, Aircel 6,01,745 and MTNL 9,300.

Out of the total wireless subscriber base (1,033.16 million), 932.51 million were found to be active in May.
The broadband segment, too, showed growth traction, with the subscriber base reaching 159.76 million in May, from 151.09 million in April.
In May, a total of 5.23 million requests were received to avail of mobile number portability (MNP). With this, the cumulative MNP requests hit 219.27 million in May.