Bharti Airtel likely to be number one telecom operator

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 gro wing 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 forthe company, which is in the process of ordering equipment in CDMA.

Currently, the company has 4.6 million customers in CDMA and is hoping
to add another 3 million customers. It is ordering equipments to add
another 2 million lines.

Source: Financial Express