GSM user base swells 13.7mn in January

India's GSM wireless telecom operators added 13.7 million new subscribers in January 2010, taking the overall subscriber base to 394.2 million, data released by industry body COAI showed. Last month’s GSM addition was marginally up from the December 2009 numbers when the GSM operators signed up 13.1 million new users. Bharti Airtel, India's top GSM mobile operator, added 2.85 million new mobile subscribers in January, taking its total to 121.7 million, according to the COAI data. Vodafone Essar signed up 2.74 million new mobile users in January this year, to boost its total to 94.1 million. Idea Cellular along with Spice Communications added 2.27 million new users, taking it to a total 59.88 million. It retains the position as the third largest GSM operator. The state-run BSNL added 2.2 million new users last month taking its total subscriber base to 59.45 million. Aircel added 2 million new users, taking its user base to 33 million and MTNL added a mere 45,067 users taking its users base to 4.6 million. The latest GSM data does not contain the subscriber addition of Tata DoCoMo, the GSM services of Tata Teleservices and the GSM numbers from Reliance Communications (RCOM). Both these companies prefer to release separate data.