Tata Tele tops in August subscriptions; beats Airtel

Tata Teleservices' decision to offer ever-lower tariffs – including GSM mobile services on a per-second basis – seems to be paying off. In August, the pan-India dual-technology telecom service provider emerged as the top telecom operator in the country in terms of new subscriber additions in a month, adding more than 34 lakh new subscribers, the company said in a press release from New Delhi on Monday.

Tata Teleservices Ltd added 3,418,138 new subscribers in August 2009 from its CDMA (Tata Indicom) and GSM operations (Tata DoCoMo) put together. Bharti Airtel, the country's biggest mobile phone operator in terms of subscribers, came a rather distant second for a change, with 2.8 million new subscribers. 

In July, too, Tata Tele had showed a healthy growth in new additions with 2.2 million new subscribers. ''While TTSL has shown a growth of 50 per cent or more in new subscriber additions in July and August 2009, other telecom operators have shown flat or negative growth in new additions in the same period,'' said the release. 

On the CDMA network, Tata Teleservices introduced a new plan on the pre-paid segment allowing users to pay Re1 for a call, irrespective of the duration. However, since this scheme was launched in September, its impact on net additions will be known only by the end of the month.

Commenting on the performance, Anil Sardana, managing director, Tata Teleservices Ltd, said, ''This is fantastic news for us, and a validation of all the efforts that have been put into making our network and services the best in the industry. This has far exceeded our expectations, and enthuses us to provide the best telecom experience to our customers - in keeping with our larger objective of achieving customer affection and delight.''

Tata Tele has 42.7 million mobile subscribers and continues to be the sixth largest player overall, behind Idea Cellular which has 50 million users.