As expected, Vodafone Essar has added a much higher 8.56 million connections in the quarter ended December 2009. In the previous quarter, it added 6.3 million. The #3 telco had a total of 91.4 million connections as of December 2009. In October, there were reports of the telco experiencing a rise in connections in Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh. Increased additions have directly led to lower ARPUs: the operator suffered a fall in Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) to Rs 209 from Rs 222 reported for the previous quarter. But other operators have fared no better: Bharti Airtel's ARPU fell to Rs 230 and Idea's to Rs 200, while RCOM's was Rs 149. Competition pressures are increasing for Vodafone with many operators offering per second billing pan-India and the growing number of Multi-SIMs. It has recorded higher annualised churn in prepaid connections at Vodafone at 38.9%, postpaid churn was at 26%. Total voice minutes, which is the total volume of incoming, outgoing and visitor calls on the Vodafone Essar network have risen to 83,172 million in the quarter. The telco has 93,000 base stations in India covering 72% of the population. Financials Year on year growth in both voice and data revenues have lifted in the quarter and total revenues were up 9.1% to GBP 767 million for the quarter ended December 2009. Comparatively, Idea's revenues were up 5.9 percent QoQ for the quarter ended December 2009, but both Bharti Airtel and RCOM experienced sequential declines of 4.79 percent and 3.9…
