Thaindian News

New Delhi, Oct 20 (IANS) The number of mobile phone subscribers in India rose to 865.7 million in August with Idea Cellular alone adding 2.33 million subscribers, official data showed Thursday.

According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the wireless user base grew 0.86 percent during the month with an addition of 7.34 million subscribers, from 858.37 million in July.

With this, the total number of telephone subscribers, including landline holders, touched 899.78 million, registering a growth of 0.81 percent.

Overall teledensity in India reached 74.96.

However, of the total 865.71 million wireless subscribers, only 608.63 million subscribers were active subscribers on the date of peak visitor location register (VLR).

VLR is a temporary database of the subscribers who have roamed into the particular area, which it serves. Each base station in the network is served by exactly one VLR, hence a subscriber cannot be present in more than one VLR at a time.

The total number of subscribers of Idea Cellular stood at 98.44 million.

Reliance Communications added 1.28 million users to take its subscribers base to 146 million. Bharti Airtel added 1.15 million subscribers to have a total of 171.85 million users.

Vodafone added 1.13 million subscribers, increasing its subscriber-count to 144.14 million while Uninor added 349,488 million subscribers to have a total of 27.74 million.

According to the data, the broadband subscriber base grew 1.46 percent from 12.5 million in July to 12.69 million in August 2011. However, the wireline segment base declined marginally from 34.18 million in July to 34.07 million at the end of August 2011.