0.24 m GSM subscribers added in Oct

The country's largest telecom operator, Airtel, led the pack, adding slightly under half a million subscribers. This follows a month of negative growth where GSM subscribers for the first time in a decade witnessed a fall, of 1.8 million. The total number of subscribers touched 672 million during the month.

Beating the previous month's trend, all top three GSM operators, Airtel, Vodafone and Idea Cellular, who hold the 67% subscriber market among themselves, posted net additions during October.

Airtel added the highest subscribers to its fold with a little less than half a million (0.491 million); close on its heels, Vodafone added 0.480 million, while Idea Cellular 0.239 million.

Compared to this, the trio had lost almost 1 million, 0.686 million and half a million, respectively, in the earlier month.

However, among new operators,Videocon continued losing subscribers, while Uninor saw a massive 1.1 million loss in subscriptions during the month.

As a result, Airtel recorded 186 million subscribers during October and a market share of 27.74%. Vodafone, with 153 million subscribers, had a 22.79% market share and Idea Cellular, with 115 million, had a 17.22% market share.

While the subscription figures for the state-run BSNL were not available, MTNL saw a marginal rise in its subscriptions as 13,652 subscribers joined its Delhi and Mumbai networks.

The category C circle fof UP east had the largest number of subscribers at 58 million where as Maharashtra recorded the maximum additions of

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