While all other industry sectors are facing the effects of the global financial turmoil, India’s telecom sector is green as ever. The total GSM mobile users at the end of October was at around 242 million with October alone having a record subscriber addition of 8 million. It broke the previous best of 7.7 million that was witnessed in September. The Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) has anticipated that the GSM base would cross the 250 million mark by December.
The biggest gainer as usual was Bharti Airtel with 2.7 million new subscribers taking its total user base to past 80 million. Vodafone Essar added more than 2 million new users and accounted a total of 56 million subscribers. State owned BSNL managed to get 6.7 lakh new users, taking its total count to 39.8 million.