Inactive SIM cards: India lost 26 mn mobile users in Dec

Idea Cellular lost 197,231 users,taking its subscriber base to 113.9 million at the end of December, 2012.

As cellphone operators continued disconnecting inactive SIMcards, India's total telecom subscriber base declined by 25.97 million to 895.51 million in December, sectoral regulator Trai said.In November, the country had 921.47 million telecom subscribers."Total wireless subscriber base decreased from 890.60 million in November 2012 to 864.72 million atthe end of December 2012. This decline is majorly due to large scale disconnections of inactive SIMs by some of the service providers," Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) said in a statement.With this, the overall teledensity (connections per 100 people) in India decreased to 73.34 percent at the end of December, 2012 from 75.55 percent in the previous month.All operators lost users in December, 2012, barring Unitech, HFCL and BSNL, which together added 995,554 users.Reliance Communications lost the largest number of users-15.58 million-taking its user base to 118.52 million at the end of December.It was followed by Vodafone, which lost 3.28 million users. RCom user base now stands at 147.47 million users.Tata Teleservices lost 2.95 million subscribers (now at 69.55 million), Aircel 1.97 million (63.34 million) and Bharti Airtel 1.7 million (181.90 million).Idea Cellular lost 197,231 users, taking its subscriber base to 113.9 million at the end of December, 2012. CDMA player Sistema Shyam lost 789,420 users and it now has a user base of 14.88 million.State-run BSNL added 13,013 users, taking its subscriber base to 99.92 million, while MTNL lost 2,975 usersand its user base now stands at 5.3 million.By the end of December 2012, about 80.06 million subscribers had submitted their requests for portingtheir mobile numbers.In MNP Zone-I (Northern and Western India), maximum number of requests have been received in Rajasthan (7.59 million), followed by Gujarat (6.94 million).