Lowest GSM users added in 32 months

NEW DELHI: Mobile phone service providers on the GSM platform added only 7.6 million subscribers in July, nearly half of 14.6 million added in February this year. This also marks the lowest customer addition during the last 32 months. The dramatic fall in customer adds indicates that the times of adding 15 million customers on a monthly basis may be over. Cellular Operators Association of India said that operators, including Bharti Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular, had added 7.6 million customers in July.

State-run operator BSNL added 1.7 million customers, highest in comparison with Bharti that added 1.5 million, Vodafone with 1.4 million, Idea and Uninor that managed to grab a little over 1 million customers each in July. This also marks the first time in over two years that BSNL has topped customer monthly customer additions. Videocon continued its losing streak as more than 95,000 customers chose to move to other service providers over the month.

On the brighter side, India's GSM subscriber base crossed 606 million subscribers over July, up from 598 million in June and 555 million in February this year. Cellular additions in India, especially on the popular GSM-technology, have been sliding for six consecutive months indicating that the dual SIM effect and hyper competition that drove the world's fastest growing market for the last two years has begun to peter out.