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New Delhi, July 1 Bharti Airtel and Reliance Communications are the only Indian players to feature in the top 20 operators worldwide in terms of subscriber base, according to Wireless Intelligence.story continues below>
Bharti Airtel is in the eighth spot with 93 million subscribers as at the end of first quarter of 2009, while RCom is at the 19th spot with 61.1 million subscribers.
New analysis from Wireless Intelligence reveals that the top 20 mobile operators ranked by total connections represented over 58 per cent of global mobile connections in the first quarter 2009. This collective footprint totals 2.4 billion connections and spans 118 of the 223 global markets tracked by Wireless Intelligence, which calls itself the global database of mobile market information.
China Mobile tops
In the first position is China Mobile, which accounts for 11.5 per cent of the total global connections across its fully-owned interests in China and Hong Kong. With a combined 479 million connections, China Mobile surpasses any other aggregated group in the global study by a factor of two.
Vodafone Group takes second position with 247 million connections across the 19 markets in which it holds a majority stake in an operator. Its most recent expansion comes via Ghana and India.