Bharti Airtel likely to be number one telecom operator

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New Delhi, Aug 17: The country’s largest mobile operator, Bharti Airtel, is soon likely to become the country’s largest telecom operator (both fixed line and mobile), beating the state-owned BSNL within a months time.

BSNL has a total subscriber base of 73 million in June, compared to Bharti’s 71.7 million. Given an average growth of previous months, Bharti should be well ahead of BSNL by at least a margin of one million subscribers.

While Bharti is adding well over 2.5 million customers each month, BSNL’s subscriber base is growing by merely 6,00,000 each month. Landline connections, which are seeing a positive growth for Bharti, constitute just a minuscule 3% of its subscribers; for BSNL, the landline subscribers constitute slightly less than half.

Bharti Airtel, which has a mobile subscriber base of over 69 million in June, is growing at an average of 3%, while BSNL, which has a mobile subscriber base of over 37 million is growing at less than 1% and adding around 3 lakh subscribers each month. The state-run company is also experiencing a decline in its fixed line growth, its landline subscribers declined by 1,60,000 in June contrary to Bharti Airtel.

BSNL, which was the country’s second largest GSM service provider before Vodafone, slipped to the third position, owing to delays in its capacity expansion arising out of the delay in tenders and equipment orders.

BSNL is now expanding the capacity of mobile network, the company has already ordered the equipment required for expansion. The company has ordered 5 million lines each for the north and eEast, while an additional 5.5 million for south and a 9 million lines for the western zone.

With this, it is hoping to have an extra capacity of as much as 24.5 million lines. In an interview to FE earlier, BSNL chairman Kuldeep Goyal had said that CDMA is another important area of expansion for the company, which is in the process of ordering equipment in CDMA.