TNI Bureau: India might be a leading nation in telecom sector, but the leading service providers were found losing their subscribers day by day. According to a recent report by the Cellular Operators’ Association of India (COAI), the top operators like Airtel, Vodafone and Idea lost a total of over 7.10 million subscribers in August.
With the decline of numbers, the country has now 671.95 million subscribers.
Airtel, Vodafone and Idea — which account for close to 68 per cent of the GSM market, lost over 5.1 million users in August, data released by COAI said.
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Airtel lost 1.90 million users to take its subscriber base to 186.9 million while Idea and Vodafone lost 1.64 million users and 1.55 million users, respectively.
The reason of this fall is expected to be due to the withdrawal of the offers and customers. But despite the loss to the top operators Aircel and Loop Mobile have managed to grow. Aircel added 793,717 new users and Loop Mobile added 79,842 new subscribers in August.
Another company, Uninor also suffered the decline of 2.38 million users, taking its subscriber base to 42.11 million at the end of August.
However, the report by COAI did not contain report of the state run phone company BSNL.