One in 5 Indians now owns a phone

One in every five persons now owns a telephone as the total number of subscribers reached 232.87 million by July, led by an addition of 8 million mobile subscribers.

Teledensity has increased to 20.52 in July 2007 as compared to 19.86 in June 2007, according to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of  India (Trai).

The telecom subscriber base was 225.01 million in June 2007.

In the wireless segment, 8.06 million subscribers were added in July, as against the addition of 7.34 million in June. The total wireless subscriber (GSM, CDMA & WLL (F)) base is 192.98 million now.

The wireline (landline) segment subscriber base stood at 39.89 million with a decline of 0.20 million in July.

Total broadband connections in the country have reached 2.47 million by the end of July, with an addition of  50 thousand links.

In July, the GSM subscriber base grew from 135.9 million in June to 141.74 million. This translates into an overall growth of 4.23% over the previous month when the addition was was 5.3 million.

The country's top mobile operator, Bharti Airtel, captured 31.58% share of the market. It added 2 million new users and its subscriber base touched 44.76 million.

Vodafone Essar added 1.68 million new users to take its user base to 32.43 million to retain the second slot, while state-run BSNL, which is struggling with capacity expansion, added just 0.55 million new users to remain at the third slot with a user base of 28.97 million.