One in 5 now owns a phone: TRAI

NEW DELHI: One in every five persons in India now owns a telephone as the total number of subscribers reached 232.87 million in July, led by an addition of whopping eight million mobile subscribers.

The tele-density has increased to 20.52 per cent in July 2007 as compared to 19.86 in June 2007, according to regulator TRAI.

The telecom subscriber base was 225.01 million in June 2007.

In the wireless segment, 8.06 million subscribers were added in July, against the addition of 7.34 million June. The total wireless subscribers (GSM, CDMA & WLL (F)) base is 192.98 million now.

The wireline segment subscriber base stood at 39.89 million with a decline of 0.20 million in July.

Total Broadband connections in the country have reached 2.47 million by the end of July with an addition of 0.05 million links.

In July, the GSM subscriber base grew from 135.9 million in June to 141.74 million, recording an addition of 5.75 million. This translates into an overall growth of 4.23 per cent over the previous month when the addition was was 5.3 million.

Country's top mobile operator Bharti Airtel captured 31.58 per cent share of the market. It added two million new users and its subscriber base touched 44.76 million.

Vodafone Essar added 1.68 million new users to take its user base to 32.43 million to retain the second slot, while state-run BSNL which is struggling with capacity expansion added just 0.55 million (5 lakh) new users to remain at the third slot with a user base of 28.97 million.