Telephone subscriber base in India crosses 500 million

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has released figures on the telecom subscriber base as in September 2009. The government had set a target of 500 million telephone connections by 2010. There are 509 million telephone subscribers, up three per cent from August. The teledensity in India has reached 43.5 per cent.
In the mobile segment, the subscriber base is almost 457 million. The teledensity in this segment stands at 40 per cent. Among the operators, Tata Teleservices showed the maximum growth in subscribers at 26 per cent. The operator has two brands – Tata Indicom in CDMA and Tata Docomo in GSM. This is followed by Bharti Airtel with 16 per cent additions.
MTS, a newcomer in the space, has shown an increase of 13 per cent in the subscriber base from the previous month, and has 1.9 million subscribers.
The wireline subscriber base stood at 37 million. BSNL and MTNL lost about 60,000 subscribers in their fixed line services.
The Broadband subscriber base has reached 7.22 million in September-09, showing a growth of 3.2 per cent.