Teledensity in India dips to 73.34 percent; telcos lose 26 mln subscribers: TRAI

Mobile operators lost 26 mln subscribers at the end of December 2012, mainly due to large scale disconnections of inactive SIMs.

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has released its latest telecom subscription data, which reveals the number of telephone subscribers in India has seen a negative growth of 2.82 percent, slumping to 895.51 million at the end of December 2012, down from 921.47 million at the end of November 2012. Overall teledensity in the country has decreased to 73.34 percent, from 75.55 registered previous month.

The negative growth was also seen in the wireless subscribers base. According to the TRAI report, total wireless subscribers base has decreased from 890.60 million in November 2012 to 864.72 million at the end of December 2012, registering a monthly growth of –2.91 percent.

“This decline is majorly due to large scale disconnections of inactive SIMs by some of the service providers. The share of urban wireless subscribers has decreased from 62.19 percent to 61.65 percent where as share of rural wireless subscribers has increased from 37.81 percent to 38.35 percent. The overall wireless teledensity in India has reached 70.82,” says the regulator in its report.

Check out the telecom operators' market share in the graphical form below:

The TRAI report also illustrates the status of the Mobile Number Portability requests in the country. Citing the data reported by the service providers, by December 2012 end, about 80.06 million subscribers have submitted their requests to different service providers for porting their number. Rajasthan saw the maximum number of portability requests (7.59 million) from the MNP Zone-I (Northern and Western India), while Karnataka received the maximum number of requests ( 9.90 million) in MNP Zone-II, which covers Souther and Eastern regions.

The status of MNP requests in various service areas is given below: