India added 82 lakh GSM users in November, says COAI

GSM mobile operators added 82.1 lakh users in November taking their overall subscriber base to 67.02 crore at the month end.

The GSM mobile user base stood at 66.21 crore at the end of October 2014, the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) said today.

The association said Loop and BSNL figures have been deleted from the subscriber base as the licence of Loop has expired and it stopped operations, whereas BSNL was not providing its figures since September 2012.

COAI, which represents telecom players like Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular, said the data does not include GSM subscriber number of Reliance Communications, Tata Teleservices and Quadrant.

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Reliance Jio Infocomm had also joined the body but the company is yet to start telecom services.

“All India GSM cellular subscribers as of November 2014 stood at 670.25 million. The GSM subscribers increased by 8.21 million in November 2014 (1.24 percent increase from previous month),” COAI said.

Country’s largest mobile operator Bharti Airtel added 20.48 lakh subscribers to its network to take its overall user base to 21.54 crore at the end of November with a market share of 32.15 percent.

Vodafone added 23.28 lakh new users to take its base to 17.71 crore whereas Idea Cellular added 25.41 lakh new subscribers to take its base to 14.79 crore during the reported period.

Aircel added 9.53 lakh subscribers and Uninor added 1.93 lakh. The user base of operators stood at 7.77 crore and 4.24 crore respectively.

Videocon added 1.30 lakh users whereas state-run MTNL added 19,280 subscribers during the period.

PTI