TRAI has issued a statement with details regarding the mobile user data base in September which reveals that there has been a significant decrease in the number of customers in this month. At the end of August, there were as many as 906.18 million telephone subscribers which fell to 899.86 million in September 2013. The monthly decline stood at 0.70 percent.
Urban subscribers’ share has reduced from 60.57 percent to 60.37 percent, whereas in the rural areas the number has gone up from 39.43 percent to 39.64 percent. And as for the teledensity, it declined from 73.60 to 73.01. Also, subscriptions in the rural areas reduced to 0.17 percent and those in urban regions witnessed a 1.04 percent reduction.
About 88.33 percent users in India use private telecom networks and about 11.67 percent make use of government-funded organizations’ network such as MTNL and BSNL. Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Idea and Reliance lead the pack with 22.21 percent, 17.87 percent, 14.01 percent and 13.35 percent respective market shares.
When it comes to losing customers, Reliance Communications came in first by deactivating 10,493,482 connections. 4 other carriers lost customers in the month of September, but their deactivations are negligible as compared to that of RCom’s. These are MTNL, Tata, BSNL and Sistema which lost 232,273, 143,567, 74,566 and 12,690 users, respectively.
And it looks like more and more people wish to get rid of their current operators as mobile number portability requests increased from 100.20 million at the end of August to 102.49 million at the end of September. About 2.29 million requests came about in September itself. And as far the broadband connections are concerned, they increased from 15.28 million to 15.36 million in the said time period.