Growth in the Indian telecom market accelerated to net subscriber additions of 15.37 million in June, nearly triple the previous month. In total, the country grew by 1.33 percent in the month to 1.169 billion telecom users, the regulator Trai reported. The overall teledensity in India reached 89.72 percent, versus 88.62 percent in May.
The mobile customer base totaled 1.146 billion in June, up by 15.49 million from the previous month. Growth was roughly evenly divided between rural and urban subscribers, with respectively 7.55 million and 7.94 million net additions in the month. Trai also counted 4.11 million requests for mobile number porting in the period. Active mobile subscribers totaled just over 1.00 billion.
Private operators held an 89.83 percent market share of India’s mobile subscriber base in June, while state-owned companies BSNL and MTNL had a market share of 10.17 percent. Bharti Airtel remained the largest operator with a 30.05 percent share, followed by merger partners Vodafone India and Idea Cellular with respectively 19.43 and 19.24 percent. Reliance Jio Infocomm was in fourth place with 18.78 percent of mobile customers and also showed the strongest growth, with net additions of 9.71 million in the month. Idea accounted for much of the rest of the growth in June, with net additions of 6.37 million.
Wireline subscribers fell by 110,000 over the month to 222.40 million. Broadband subscribers totaled 447.12 million, including 429.22 million on mobile, up from 432.00 million in May. Reliance Jio had the most wireless broadband subscribers, at 215.26 million, while BSNL led the wireline market, with 9.15 million fixed broadband subscribers.
