The mobile subscriber base in the country continued to decline for the fourth consecutive month with numbers falling from 890.60 million in November 2012 to 864.72 million at the end of December 2012 with a negative growth of  –2.91%.

The Telecom Authority of India which released the latest figures attributed to fall in subscriber base to large scale disconnections of inactive SIMs by some of the service providers. The share of urban wireless subscribers has decreased from 62.19% to 61.65% where as share of rural wireless subscribers has increased from 37.81% to 38.35%. The overall wireless Teledensity in India has reached 70.82.

According to the regulator, mobile subscription in urban areas decreased from 553.91 million in November 2012 to 533.12 million at the end of December 2012. The wireless subscription in rural areas decreased from 336.70 million to 331.60 million during the same period. The urban wireless Teledensity has decreased from 149.32 to 143.48 and rural Teledensity has decreased from 39.67 to 39.04.
 
The number of telephone subscribers in India decreased to 895.51 million at the end of December, 2012 from 921.47 million at the end of November 2012, thereby registering a monthly growth rate of -2.82%. The share of urban subscribers has declined to 62.20% from 62.70% whereas share of rural subscribers has increased to 37.80% in the month of December 2012. With this, the overall Teledensity in India decreased to 73.34 at the end of December, 2012 from 75.55 of the previous month.

During the month, Uninor added 9.18 lakh subscribers because of new customers in Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh (East) and Uttar Pradesh (West). BSNL has also improved its subscribers base.

But the telecom operators who have shown negative growth are-Reliance Comminucations (RCom) which lost 15.58 crore subscribers during December, followed by Vodafone which lost 32 lakh customers.
 
The subscriber base of Tata has gone down by (29 lakh,  Aircel by 19 lakh loss), Bharti (decline of 17 lakh), Sistema (7.8 lakh drop), Videocon (3.7 lakh decline) and Idea Cellular (a drop of 1.9 lakh). Loop and MTNL also lost subscribers marginally during December, according to the TRAI data.
 
Total Broadband subscriber base has increased from 14.88 million at the end of November 2012 to 14.98 million at the end of December 2012, there by showing a monthly growth of 0.67%. Yearly growth in broadband subscribers is 12.62% during the last one year (December 2011 to December 2012).
 
As on 31st December 2012, there are 160 Internet Service Providers (ISPs) which are providing broadband services in the country. Out of these, 130 ISPs have provided broadband subscription data for the month of December 2012, for the rest of the ISPs data from previous month has been retained (Data from top 10 ISPs, which constitute 93.16% of the total subscriber base, have been received for the month of December 2012). Top five ISPs in terms of market share (based on subscriber base) are: BSNL (9.90 million), Bharti Airtel (1.39 million), MTNL (1.06 million), Hathway (0.37 million) and You Broadband (0.29 million).

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