Rural India seems to be driving growth for telecom operators with little less than half of the 6.67 million new mobile users in July coming from this segment.

Operators added 6.67 million new subscribers in the month of July, taking the total wireless userbase to 858.37 million, according to the data released by telecom regulator Trai.

Of this, while 3.59 million subscribers were from urban India, the remaining 3.08 million were from rural India.

The total number of telephone subscribers (wireless and wireline) in the country stood at 892.55 million at the end of July, 2011 from 885.99 million in June 2011, Trai said.

With this, the overall teledensity (phones per 100 people) in India reached 74.44 at the end of July, 2011, it added.

After phenomenal growth in the sector with additions of 12-14 million additions a month, the pace of growth seems to be slowing down.

Last month, 11.41 million wireless users were added, while in May, 13.35 million users were added. Operators had added 15.34 million new subscribers in April, while in March, 20.21 million new mobile subscribers were added.

The growth in the wireless category in the month of July was led by Reliance Communications, which added 1.52 million users, taking its subscriber base to 144.78 million by the end of July 2011.

Bharti Airtel added 1.51 million subscribers, taking its user base to 170.69 million, while Vodafone added 1.49 million new customers (taking its user base to 143.01 million).

Operators like Tata Teleservices and Videocon, however, lost customers during the reported period. While TTSL lost 2.67 million users in July, Videocon lost 95,010 users.

Idea Cellular and Aircel added one million and 0.60 million users respectively, during the period.

State-run telcos BSNL added 1.42 million new users taking it total subscriber base to 95.14 million. .

Another state-run firm MTNL, which operates in Delhi and Mumbai, regained growth in addition of new mobile phone subscribers. The company added 25,578 new subscriber taking its total wireless customer base to 5.52 million.

In June, MTNL had lost 2,340 subcribers.

Wireline subscriber base declined from 34.29 million in June 2011 to 34.18 million at the end of July 2011.

There was marginal increase in broadband subscriber base in July to 12.50 million from 12.32 million in June.

At the end of July, about 15.54 million subscribers requested to change their operators through Mobile Number Portability (MNP).

Top three telecom circles where mobile phone users opted for MNP were Gujarat with 1.5 million request, followed by Maharashtra (1.2 million) and Karnataka (1.1 million).

However, the number of active mobile subscribers, according to the visitor location register (VLR) data, during July was 601.73 million.

VLR numbers provide details on active customers at any given point of time, excluding switched-off and out-of-the- coverage area customers.