This August, India crossed the 200 milion mobile subscriber mark. At 201.29 million subscribers as in August 2007, the world’s fastest growing telecom market added over 8 million subscribers, taking the total telecom subscriber base to over 241.02 million. The government had set a target of 200 million mobile phones and 250 million phones (fixed and mobile combined) for end-2007. While the first has been achieved ?? four months ahead of schedule ?? the country is yet to reach the total subscriber target as fixed line connections have been declining.
While the GSM subscriber base increased by 6 million in August over the previous month to reach 147.7 million, the CDMA base stood at over 57 million.This pushed up the country’s overall teledensity from 20.52 per cent to 21.2 per cent during the month. The fixed line base, however, slipped by 0.16 million over the previous month to clock in at 39.73 million.
Interestingly, India hit the 100 million mobile phone mark only as recently as May 2006. While it took over 10 years to achieve 100 million mobile subscribers (wireless telephony was introduced in 1995), it has taken just a little over a year to achieve the next 100 million.
Today, India ranks next only to China and the US, which have 492 million and 244 million mobile subscribers respectively as of July 2007. Russia at 175 million has been left well behind.
Given the current growth trend, the Economic Survey of India predicts that the country will have 650 million telephone connections, 66 million wired and 584 million wireless, by 2012.
Meanwhile, the government’s other thrust area, broadband, has yet to pick up.The total broadband connections in the country reached 2.56 million in August 2007, registering an increase of 0.09 million connections over the previous month, but still nowhere close to the target of 9 million by end-2007.
