Telephone connections cross 153.39 mn in June

The total number of tele­phones in the country for June crossed 153.39
million compared to 148.42 million as on May 31, 2006, a gro­wth of 3.35
percent. The annual growth has been reported at 48.50 per cent. The strong trend
in the number of new telephone subscribers continued in the month of June with a
net addition of about 4.97 million phones, an average daily addition of 1.66
lakh lines.

The mobile phone seg­ment led the growth with GSM contributing 3.19 million
and CDMA contri­buting 1.66 million, respec­tively. The additions in the fixed
line segment during the month was about 0.12 million.

 Of the 66,822 villages that remained to be covered under the Bharat
Nirman Programme on November 2004, a total of 25,870 Villa­ge Public Telephones
(VPTs) have been provi­ded. The remaining 40,952 villages having more than 100
population and not lying in thick forest area are to be covered by November
2007.

The Northeast telecom circle continued to record the highest growth rate
(10.10 percent) in the GSM segment, followed by Mad­hya Pradesh (9.22 per­cent)
and Assam tele­com circles (7.51 percent).

In the CDMA segment, the total subscriber base re­gi­stered a growth of 16
per­cent with a net addi­tion of 1.66 million subscri­bers. Andhra Pradesh
and Maha­ra­shtra contributed the maximum to this addi­tion. Andhra Pradesh
alone added 4.07 lakh subscri­bers during the month.