100 Million and Counting

Eleven years after mobile telephony was opened up for private participation, India has grabbed fifth place in the world in terms of total mobile phone connections shipped.

With 100 million mobile phone subscribers, India now ranks after only China, the US, Russia and Japan in absolute numbers of mobile phone connections, the government announced on Thursday.

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Telecom operators have been saying that the mobile subscriber count has grown at 4-5 million every month this year.....

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‘‘We are now in the M-5 club, and we should be happy. There is no need to find unnecessary loopholes since we are sure of making it to 250 million phones by 2007 and 500 million phones by 2010.....’’ the Minister said.

At present in India, subscribers are counted on the basis of the number of SIM cards or connections sold. The government will now consider moving to a system of counting the total number of active connections. [IndianExpress]