TRAI’s latest figures released for the October-December 2009 quarter show that tele-density in Urban India for wireless services was at 103.20 at the end of the quarter from 94.98 at the end of September 2009 quarter. A immediate inference of this figure is that every Indian living in urban area has a mobile phone connection, though in reality it appears to be far from true as even in cities there are reasonable number of people who are yet to be connected to the mobile network.

Interestingly while service providers have been more vocal about their rural focus now, the tele-density in this segment increased only moderately from 17.22 in September 2009 to 19.95 at the end of December 2009.

India’s total subscriber base for telecom services stands at 562.16 million in December 2009 as compared to 509.16 million in September 2009, i.e. addition of over 50 million subscribers in quarter.

Subscriber base in rural areas for telecom services is 174.53 million with 164.57 million of these being subscribers of mobile services.

Also with more and more GSM players entering the field, the share of CDMA platform is seen sliding. In September 2009, CDMA technology’s market share was 21.4% which dropped down to 19.7 % by December 2009. The country now has 103.51 million CDMA subscribers as compared to 421.58 million GSM subscribers.

Revenues from telecom services increased from Rs 38,854.65 crore in September 2009 to Rs 39,756.64 crore at the end of December 2009.

ARPU from GSM services dropped from Rs 164 to Rs 144 while for CDMA services the ARPU reduced from Rs 89 to Rs 82.

Another noteworthy trend visible from the figures is that Indian subscribers seem to be opening up to VoIP services as the minutes of usage of internet telephony increased from 118.01 million in September 2009 to 120.48 million by the end of December 2009.