September 23, 2007	Sunday	Ramazan 10, 1428

NEW DELHI, Sept 22: The number of Indian mobile phone subscribers has passed the 200 million mark after the country added another eight million customers last month, industry figures show.

India’s wireless market, the world’s fastest growing, attracted a further 8.31 million wireless subscribers in August to touch 201.29 million users, according to figures from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) on Saturday.

The latest mobile milestone comes just over a year after India crossed the 100-million subscriber mark in May 2006.

At the end of August, India had 241.02m telephone subscribers in total, compared with 232.87 million at the end of July.

The country’s teledensity -- the number of people owning a telephone out of every 100 people -- rose slightly to 21.20 per cent by August-end compared with 20.52 per cent by July-end, the data showed.

Among the wireless operators, India’s top mobile company Bharti Airtel added 2.05 million users in August, taking its subscriber base to 46.8 million.

The fixed-line segment stood at 39.73 million subscribers at the end of August while broadband connections rose by 90,000 to reach 2.56 million.

India’s mobile revolution is mainly confined to the cities, but the real prize for phone companies is the vast rural market, where nearly 70 per cent of India’s 1.1 billion population lives, analysts say.

The government is aiming for more than half a billion mobile phone subscribers by 2010.

—AFP