Its Official – India Crosses 500 Million Telecom Subscriber Mark in September

The target of 500 Million Telecom subscriber mark was set for December 2010, but it has been achieved 15 months before the target date !

Total Indian Telephone Subscriber Base stands at 509 Million at end of September 2009.

Telecom Regulatory Authority’s September End reports this figure – The month saw addition of close to 15 million subscribers.

This was expected to happen given the tremendous growth India has seen in wireless connections over last couple of years. If anything the growth rate is only going to accelerate in coming months – Thanks to falling rates and attractive schemes launched by Mobile Telecom Companies.

Here are the highlights of report released by TRAI for September 2009:

• Total Telephone subscriber base reaches 509 Million
  • Wireless subscription reaches 471.7 Million
  • Wireline subscription declines to 37.3 Million
• 14.98 Million new additions in Wireless 
• Wireline subscription declines by 0.02 Million
• Overall Tele-density reaches 43.50
• Broadband subscription is 7.21 million

The number of telephone subscribers in India increased to 509.03 Million at the end of September-09 from 494.07 Million in August-2009, thereby registering a growth rate of 3.03%. With this,  the overall Tele-density in India reaches 43.50.

Telecom company wise subscriber addition (Sept 2009)

Being in the forefront of launching innovating schemes and One Second billing seems to have done wonders to the subscriber addition figures of Tata. It mopped up more than quarter (26.74%) of all the wireless subscribers that were added in September 2009.

Bharti came in at 2nd position with 16.78% followed by Reliance (13.38%) and Vodafone (13.16%).

Broadband (≥ 256 Kbps download) 

Broadband numbers remain a drag. It just doesn’t seem to be catching up with the masses. High prices, intermittent connections and availability are still issues that are hampering Broadband growth in India.

Total Broadband subscriber base has increased from 6.98 million in August-09
to 7.22 million in September-09, thereby showing a growth of 3.29 %. 

So what’s your take – Will we reach 1 billion mark in next 3 years :) (considering current growth rate of 15 million additions p.m). There are countries who have tele-density more than 100%. If we cross 80% we should make that number..what say?

I am hopeful, especially that our Telecom Minister has a dream of making local call prices as low as 10 paise per minute making it affordable to nearly every Indian.

Author: Arun Prabhudesai

Arun Prabhudesai is founder / chief editor at trak.in. He jumped the Entrepreneurship bandwagon in early 2008 after a long 13 year stint in I.T Industry. You can follow him on twitter @trakin or get in touch with him at admin-at-trak-dot-in or 91.9822575676.

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