Hinting at a possible saturation among mobile phone users, Gujarat registered the second least monthly net additions in subscribers in telecom. Gujarat added only 31,279 new subscribers for the month of November to the existing total subscriber base in the state of 42.864 million users. Only Himachal Pradesh posted a lower monthly net additions than Gujarat at 30,005 users for the said month. However, continuing their golden run in the state, telecom operators Vodafone and Videocon have continued to add subscribers in Gujarat at a time when others are losing subscriber base. The two operators have been the highest gainers in mobile number portability (MNP) in the state. Despite huge additions in users by the two telecom operators, the net additions in Gujarat came down due to other operators like Idea Cellular, Bharti Airtel, Telewings and Aircel posting a decline in their subscriber base. While Idea saw negative net additions of -32,726 users, bringing down its user base to 8.738 from 8.770 million users, Airtel posted negative net additions of -26,173 users resulting a reduced subscriber base at 7.136 million users.

(Business Standard)