India adds 6.5 mln new mobile users in May

Indian mobile telephone service providers added 6.5 million new customers in May, the government said on Tuesday.

However the number of fixed-line users fell by 200,000. The total number of telephone users stood at 218.06 million.

The government has projected 500 million telephone subscribers by 2010, 440 million of them using mobiles.

GSM mobile firms logged 5 million new customers during the month, while the CDMA segment registered an increase of 1.5 million, led by Reliance Communications.

India has been adding about six million new mobile phone users each month, lured by call rates as low as one U.S. cent a minute.