India adds 3.9 million mobile users in April

India the fastest growing wireless market, added a total of 3.9 million users in the month of April. Which looks great but it was substantialy less than the last month's addition which was 5.14 million. These addition casused the total mobile user base soar to 94.44 million, more than the total of combined population of Germany and Greece. The Association of Unified Telecom Service Providers of India said five CDMA networks added 974,360 users in April. While the Cellular Operators Association, which represents eight GSM carriers, said 2.93 million users signed up in the same month. This month top seated firm was Bharti's Airtel getting a total of 1.1 million GSM users. Which was followed by Reliance Communications Ventures Ltd., which offers both CDMA and GSM services added 502,250 new users. The third and fourth ranked firms were BSNL and Hutch adding a total of 430,000 and 700,000 new users respectively.
This whole growth is being fueled due to a no. of reasons. One of them is that we are offering the cheapest call rates in the world. Moreover falling handset rates, lifetime packages are luring more and more customers. One more thing which should be mentioned is that we will be soon seeing plans from all the major operators offering free call to ther own network without recharging. Tatas had already started such a plan offering outgoing calls to its own network for 2 years for free. And soon other opeartors will come up with their plans too. These plans will definetly boost the no. of connections in coming months.
But still we are lagging, still less than 10 percent of India's population has access to mobile services as networks are still concentrated in cities. However Operators are now thinking of reaching to the huge untapped rural market where more than two-third of population live.