GPRS India

From Mobile Pundit

From Mobile Pundit

18 lakh GPRS users in Gujarat

If this report from Business Standard is to be believed, there are 18 lakh GPRS users in Gujarat alone! So what would be the total number 0f GPRS users in India?

GSM subscriber base crossed the mark of 50 lakh recently in the state. Operators have witnessed a growth on an average of around 200% of GPRS subscribers in Gujarat.

Nearly all handsets above Rs. 4000 in the market are GPRS capable. What would be interesting to know is if these GPRS connections are being used for internet connectivity (mobile as a modem for PC), since availability of even dial-up internet is a question mark in rural India. Brough Turner had pointed out this in his comment on why Reliance Infocomm is seeing surging demand for data in non-urban India.

Hutch:

"We have seen a jump of around 300 per cent in the number of GPRS subscribers across the state within a year," said Sunil Sood, operations director of Hutch.

Airtel:

B P Singh, COO, Bharti-Airtel in Gujarat,said, "Airtel witnessed a ten fold growth in GPRS subscribers here."

Idea:

Gururaj Kulkarni, circle head and VP of Idea Cellular, said, "After Idea launched GPRS in August 2004, we have GPRS enabled sites across the circle today covering every small city within its coverage. "We have seen a growth of more than 100 per cent in the GPRS subscriber in the state," Kulkarni added.

BSNL:

BSNL is also providing GPRS and EDGE services. "Currently, we are offering the services in 18 cities and 64 villages. We have recently started the service so it would be difficult to judge the growth but we have seen a tremendous demand for GPRS even in the rural area," said Piyush Khare, DGM mobile, Gujarat, BSNL.

April saw the GSM user additions in India go below 3 million users mark for the first time in 2006.

According to the subscriber figures released by the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), the GSM user base touched 72.12 million in April, up from 69.2 million in March.

Bharti = 20.68 million
BSNL = 17.59 million
Hutch = 16.06 million
Idea = 7.64 million
Aircel = 2.83 million
Reliance = 2.01 million
Spice = 1.98 million
MTNL = 2.02 million
BPL = 1.31 million

GSM user growth in this year:

April 2006 = 2.93 million
March 2006 = 3.78 million
February 2006 = 3.17 million
January 2006 = 3.50 million