Telecom subscriber base fell in July for the first time

11 Sep 2012 Evaluate

The telecom subscriber base has fallen for the first time in July on a month on month basis, as per the data of Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the total subscriber base fell by 20.71 million to 944.81 million in July from 965.52 million a month ago. There has been decline in subscriber addition since February last year, before February 2011, the industry’s net subscriber addition was around 20 million a month and by June 2012 it came down to 5 million.

Apart from other reasons, one major reason for the decline was new operators stopping services in some of the circles owing to the uncertainty over their licences. Previously, operators could get more spectrum if they added more subscribers and hence the telcos concentrated on subscriber addition but now, with auction being the preferred allocation method, the companies are concentrating more on the revenue generation.

As per TRAI’s data, while the overall telephone subscriber showed de-growth of 2.14%, the share of urban subscribers declined by 63.83% from 64.40%, whereas share of rural subscribers increased to 36.17% in the month of July 2012. With this, the overall tele-density in India reached 77.79 at the end of July, 2012 from 79.58 of the previous month. Mobile Number Portability requests increased from 54.33 million subscribers at the end of June 2012 to 59.31 million at the end of July 2012. In the month of July 2012 alone, 4.98 million requests were made for MNP.

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