After January's record addition of 9.7 million GSM cellular subscribers, February's addition of 9,184,944 subscribers has come as a disappointment. The total number of GSM subscribers is now 277.1 million, up 3.43 percent from 267.9 million in January, according to COAI. India had added 15.41 million mobile subscribers (inclusive of GSM and CDMA) in January to reach 362.30 million in January. Medianama's report on the January mobile statistics is here. Director General of COAI,TV Ramachandran, has explained the phenomenon in the Economic Times, "The January jump was mostly on account of promotional offers. This cannot be replicated month-on-month." Bharti Airtel led the operators, adding 2.73 million customers in February. Last month, CDMA player Reliance bagged the largest number of additions - a whopping 4.95 million. Reliance and Tata Indicom, another CDMA operator, are yet to reveal their subscriber additions for the month. Nikhil adds: The promotional offers that Ramachandran is referring to, are probably the Reliance GSMs a free SIM card distribution. Some telecom operator executives told me that, on their networks, they noticed that consumers go offline for a short period of time - 5-10 days, and come back on. They think that consumers switched to Reliance GSM, utilized the free talktime, and then went back to their old operators. Market Share Bharti Airtel's market share has dropped marginally to 32.88% in the GSM space with 91 million subscribers. Vodafone Essar followed closely with 2.6 million additions totalling 66 million customers and a 24% marketshare. BSNL saw an increase of…
