NEW DELHI: Even as the Government is making efforts to reach the north east and to create awareness of Digital India, the number of broadband subscribers for the first time crossed the 100 million mark to register a base of 100.76 million at the end of April.

This was a slight increase of 1.57 per cent over the figure of March, which had shown 99.20 million subscribers.

This was primarily due to mobile devices users (phones and dongles), which grew from 93.24 million to 84.79 million, thus showing a growth of 1.86 per cent. Fixed wireless subscribers (Wi-fi, Wi-Max, Point to Point Radio and VSAT) showed a meager growth of 0.35 per cent and stood at just over 440, 000 while wired subscribers showed an even lesser growth of 0.04 per cent at just around 15.52 million.

The top five service providers constituted 83.40 per cent market share of the total broadband subscribers at the end of April.

These service providers were Bharti Airtel (22.63 million), Vodafone (20.30 million), BSNL (18.02 million), Idea Cellular Ltd (15.01 million) and Reliance Communications Group (8.08 million).

Some wireless service providers exclude incidental data users from their subscriber base based on minimum usage decided by them.

As on 30 April, 2015, the top five wired broadband service providers were BSNL (9.92 million), Bharti Airtel (1.44 million), MTNL (1.14 million), Atria Convergence Technologies (0.68 million) and You Broadband (0.45 million).

As on 30 April, the top five wireless broadband service providers were Bharti Airtel (21.19 million), Vodafone (20.29 million), Idea Cellular (15.01 million), BSNL (8.10 million) and Reliance Communications Group (7.97 million).