Tata Tele top grosser of mobile users in Oct

Cellular service provider Tata Teleservices today said it has become the top grosser of subscribers for the third consecutive month, with over 3.8 million new mobile users in October.

Tata Teleservices (TTSL), which is credited for starting per second billing for subscribers, has added 3.8 million users in October from its CDMA (Tata Indicom) and GSM operations (TATA DOCOMO) put together.

With the latest addition, it has crossed the 50-million subscriber milestone in October.

In September 2009, TTSL added 4 million subscribers while in August TTSL led the market by adding over 3.4 million new users.

"October is the third consecutive month that we have achieved the highest number of net subscriber additions.This has far exceeded our expectations," TTSL Managing Director Anil Sardana said.

After the announcement of per-second billing scheme by Tata, many companies such as Airtel, Vodafone, MTS, Idea had started such schemes for their users.

However, Sardan said "None of them have picked up the pay per use paradigm in its entirety, which is a pity because the Indian telecom subscriber is being deprived of full value for his or her money.