Digital India fails to impact growth of broadband subscribers

NEW DELHI: At a time when the government is working on programmes like Digital India, there has been an increase of a meager 1.88 per cent in the number of broadband subscribers between February and March this year.
According to a Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) report, the number rose from 97.37 million at the end of February to 99.20 million.

As in previous months, the largest increase was in the mobile devices users (phones and dongles) segment from 81.48 million to 83.24 million, showing an increase of 2.17 per cent.


The increase in fixed wire subscribers (Wi-Fi, Wi-Max, Point to Point Radio and VSAT) was from 440,000 to a little above that figure. The rise in wired subscribers was from 15.45 million to 15.45 million to 15.52 million.

The top five service providers constituted 83.39 per cent market share of total broadband subscribers at the end of March. These service providers were Bharti Airtel (22.01 million), Vodafone (19.37 million), BSNL (18.88 million), Idea Cellular Ltd (14.52 million) and Reliance Communications Group (7.94 million).

Some wireless service providers exclude incidental data users from their subscriber base, based on minimum usage decided by them.

As on 31 March, the top five Wired Broadband Service providers were BSNL (9.96 million), Bharti Airtel (1.43 million), MTNL (1.14 million), Atria Convergence Technologies (0.67 million) and YOU Broadband (0.44 million).

The top five Wireless Broadband Service providers were Bharti Airtel (20.58 million), Vodafone (19.37 million), Idea Cellular (14.52 million), BSNL (8.92 million) and Reliance Communications Group (7.83 million).

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