India’s mobile phone user base exceeds 1bn subscribers

India’s mobile phone subscribers’ base has surged to more than one billion users, making it the second country after China to reach the record number, officials said on Thursday.
A Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) report said the total wireless subscribers in the country rose to more than one billion at the end of October, from 996.7 million the previous month.
The TRAI data showed there were a total of 26 million landline connections in India, which had a population of more than 1.25 billion people.
The Indian mobile market had experienced tremendous growth in recent years, fuelled by aggressive competition, cheaper mobiles and low call tariffs.
Over the past months, the market appeared to have saturated but there is still growth.
According to the data, 928 million of the total 1.029 billion connections were active.
The TRAI data shows that the Indian capital, New Delhi, has the maximum penetration of telephone connections for every hundred people, also known as teledensity.
Even in poor states such as Bihar, every resident has an average of one phone.
Sales of low-cost smartphones have also surged in India.
According to Counterpoint Research, users were upgrading to cheaper smartphones, which now account for a third of all mobile phone sales in the country.