Bharti Airtel has become the third largest mobile operator in the world in terms of subscribers.

Airtel, India’s top telecom operator, has more than 303 million mobile subscribers across its operations, according to the latest data published by WCIS. Airtel has presence in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka and Africa.

Airtel key milestones

1994 – Wins GSM licenses for mobile service in Delhi and NCR
1995 – Launches services under the Airtel brand name
1997 – Becomes the first mobile service provider in the country to cross 100,000 customer mark
2008 – Crosses 60 million customer mark
2009 – Crosses the magical 100 million customer mark
2009 – Expands operation to Sri Lanka
2010 – Expands operations to Bangladesh
2010 – Announces acquisition of Zain telecom
2011 – Launches 3G services and airtel money in India
2012 – Launches India’s first 4G services
2012 – Bharti Airtel becomes the fourth largest mobile operator in the world
2014 – Bharti Airtel crosses 300 million customers milestone across mobile, fixed line & DSL, and DTH services
2015 – Airtel becomes the third largest mobile operator in the world

China Mobile is the #1 telecom operator with 626.27 million mobile subscribers. Vodafone Group has 403.08 million mobile subscribers. China Unicom has 299.09 million mobile subscribers. America Movil has 274.14 million mobile subscribers.

Sunil Bharti Mittal, chairman of Bharti Airtel, said: “This is a major landmark in the journey of Airtel and underlines the strength of our business model and our brand that is loved by customers across 20 countries.”

Airtel said its mobile networks cover over 1.85 billion people across its operations in 20 countries and carried over 1.23 trillion minutes of calls and over 333 petabytes of data in FY 2014-15.

Bharti Airtel said its distribution channel in India is spread across 1.5 million outlets, with network presence in 5,121 census and 464,045 non-census towns and villages covering approximately 86.8 percent of the population. Airtel has more than 100 million mobile customers from rural markets in India.

Airtel is the only mobile operator in India to offer 4G services in over 30 cities using TD – LTE and FDD – LTE technology. Airtel plans to launch 4G services in India’s first FDD‐LTE on 1800 MHz in 6 telecom circles.

In Bangladesh, Bharti Airtel’s distribution network comprises over 146K retailers across the country.

Airtel’s 3G presence across over 70 percent of its network is amongst the highest 3G ratio available across the subcontinent.

Baburajan K
[email protected]