TRAI: India's Tele-density at 95.52 Per Cent in September 2026

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has released its telecom subscription data for the month of September 2026. The regulator publishes these figures every month, covering telephone and broadband users, the growth of mobile and landline connections, the split between towns and villages, tele-density, active mobile users and porting requests.

Tele-density, the headline measure

Tele-density means the number of telephone connections for every hundred people. Counting machine-to-machine cellular connections, India's overall tele-density reached 95.52 per cent. Leave those machine-to-machine connections out and the figure works out to 85.41 per cent. Wireless connections alone account for a density of 92.12 per cent, while wireline contributes just 3.40 per cent.

The town and village gap

The averages hide a wide gap. Urban tele-density stands at 155.85 per cent, which crosses a hundred because many city users hold more than one connection. Rural tele-density is 61.30 per cent. Within the wireline segment the imbalance is sharper still: urban density is 8.38 per cent against a rural 0.58 per cent.

Who holds the connections

Towns and cities hold 59.05 per cent of all telephone subscribers and villages 40.95 per cent. Within wireless alone the split is 57.94 per cent urban and 42.06 per cent rural, while wireline is heavily urban at 89.09 per cent against 10.91 per cent.

Growth, porting and active users

• The total subscriber base grew 0.53 per cent during the month; wireline grew faster in percentage terms at 0.60 per cent.
• Urban subscribers rose 0.69 per cent and rural subscribers 0.31 per cent, so the gap widened a little further.
• Requests for Mobile Number Portability came to 16.77 million in the month.
• Active wireless users, measured on the day of peak Visitor Location Register count, numbered 1,212.80 million.

TRAI works out tele-density using population projections from the Report of the Technical Group on Population Projections for India and States 2011 to 2036, published in September 2020. The subscriber numbers themselves come from returns that telecom service providers file with the regulator.