What's a few million when you have 988 million active mobile connections in India? The Active connection data represents peak VLR (Visitor Location Register) data for the month, so it includes users roaming from on another telecom operators network (For example, Airtel, Idea and Vodafone have Intra-circle roaming arrangements which allow 3G users from Airtel to roam on an Idea 3G network). These are counted as separate Internet connections, and there is also multi-SIM usage, so the number of connections should not be seen as active users. Some stats: – Airtel has the second highest active connection base of 97.00%, followed by Vodafone at 94.54%. – There were 988.14 million active connections in the month of December 2016. – Idea has 100.83% of connections active on its network - the highest among all telcos. TRAI says the percentage of active connections is more than 100% due to in-roamers i.e. subscribers from other operators roaming in Idea’s network. In terms of the number of active connections, Airtel leads with 257.87 million connections followed by Vodafone at 193.51 million connections. Mobile Operator Leaderboard For December 2016 (Total Connections): – Reliance Jio added 20.28 million connections, taking its connection base to 72.15 million. – Idea added 2.83 million connections, taking its connection base to 190.51 million. – Airtel added 2.50 million connections, taking its connection base to 265.85 million. Top 4 telcos have 73% of total active connections The top three telecom operators in India – Vodafone, Airtel and Idea Cellular – added 7.53 million…
