Telecommunications Statistics in India

Telecommunications Statistics In India

India has the fastest growing telecom network in the world with its high population and development potential. Airtel, Idea, Reliance, Tata DoCoMo, BSNL, Aircel, Tata Indicom, Vodafone, MTNL, and Loop Mobile are other major operators in India. However, rural India still lacks strong infrastructure. India's public sector telecom company BSNL is the 7th largest telecom company in world.

Telephony introduced in India in 1882. The total number of telephones in the country stands at 960.9 million, while the overall teledensity has increased to 79.28% as of May 31, 2012. and the total numbers of mobile phone subscribers have reached 929.37 million as of May 2012. The mobile tele-density has increased to 76.68% in May 2012. In the wireless segment, 8.35 million subscribers were added in May 2012. The wire line segment subscriber base stood at 31.53 million.

Indian telecom operators added a staggering 227.27 million wireless subscribers in the 12 months between Mar 2010 and Mar 2011 averaging at 18.94 million subscribers every month. To put this into perspective, China which currently possesses the world's largest telecommunications network added 119.2 million wireless subscribers during the same period (March 2010 - March 2011) - averaging 9.93 million subscribers every month (a little over half the number India was adding every month). So, while India might currently be second to China in the TOTAL number of mobile subscribers, India has been adding nearly twice as many subscribers EVERY month until March 2011. Mobile teledensity increased by almost 18.4 percentage points from Mar 2010 and Mar 2011 (49.60% to 67.98%) while wireline subcriber numbers fell by a modest 2.2 million. This frenetic pace of monthly subscriber additions means that the Indian mobile subscriber base has shown a year on year growth of 43.23%. According to recent reports, India was purported to overtake China to become the world's largest mobile telecommunications market by the year 2013. It was also predicted that by 2013, the teledensity will shoot up to 75% and the total mobile subscriber base would be a colossal 1.159 billion.