1.66 lakh daily phone additions in June: Govt

New Delhi, July 17 (UNI) The government today said that the strong trend in the number of new telephone subscribers spearheaded by mobile phones 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.

As a result, the total number of telephones in the country crossed 153.39 million, as against total of 148.42 million as on May 31, 2006,. a growth of 3.35 per cent.

The growth in June 2006 was 48.50 per cent over that of June 2005.

Almost the entire growth registered was in the mobile segment - 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.

The overall teledensity improved further to 13.91 per cent in June 2006 from 13.27 per cent in May 2006 and from 9.37 per cent as on June 30, 2005. The North-East telecom circle continued to record the highest growth rate (10.10%) in the GSM segment, followed by Madhya Pradesh (9.22 per cent) and Assam telecom circles (7.51 per cent).

In the CDMA segment, the total subscriber base registered a growth of 16 per cent 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.

The growth of broadband connections improved further and at the end of May 2006, over 1.46 million broadband connections were provided and coverage of broadband connectivity by public sector service providers has reached 354 cities. Further, the total number of existing ISP licencees is 408.

Under Bharat Nirman Programme, of the 66,822 villages remaining to be covered on November 2004, a total of 25870 Village Public Telephones (VPTs) have been provided. The remaining 40952 villages having more than 100 population and not lying in thick forest area etc. are to be covered by November 2007.

UNI RT PV KN1712