Cellular firms saw the addition of 1.09 million new subscribers in August, taking the total cellular subscription in the country to 17.39 million, up from 16.2 million in July.
However, the number of new cellular subscribers added in August was slightly lower than the 1.14 million new users added in July.
Of the new additions, Bharti Cellular accounted for 350,000. This takes its total subscriber base to 4,389,000. Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd added 290,000 new users and now has a total of 3,680,000 subscribers. Bharti now leads BSNL by 702,198.
In fact, the top four players accounted for 88 per cent of the net additions.
This is the third consecutive month when the industry saw over 1 million additions. The huge growth has primarily been spurred by the decision of cellular operators to make incoming calls free from May 1.
The other reason for this is the greater emphasis among cellular operators to make their pre-paid tariff schemes attractive.
Most pre-paid schemes now have facilities that were earlier available only to post-paid subscribers. More than 75 per cent of the new additions are on pre-paid cards.
According to the figures released by the Cellular Operators Association of India, Delhi continued to be the largest market, with 2,480,000 subscribers. Mumbai followed with 2,120,000 cell users.
The exact figures for other states is not known as BSNL has not given a circle-wise break-up of subscribers. According to industry sources, COAI did not want to wait for details from BSNL since it wanted to release the figures before the Association of Basic Telecom Operators released their figures for wireless-in-local-loop limited mobility users.
ABTO has also been reporting an addition of a million new WLL subscribers each month for the last two months. COAI and ABTO are involved in a fierce turf battle over the issue of limited mobility.
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