New Delhi, April 7 (IANS) The number of mobile subscribers in India rose to 791.38 million in February with the addition of 20.2 million connections, official data shows.

According to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the wireless user base grew 2.62 percent, from 771.18 million in January.

While the share of urban subscribers declined to 66.36 percent from 66.42 percent, the share of rural subscribers increased from 33.58 percent to 33.64 percent, the report said.

With this, the total number of telephone subscriber base touched 826.25 million, registering a growth of 2.50 percent.

Overall teledensity in India reached 69.29.

However, according to the report, of the total 791.38 million subscribers in February, only 562.98 million subscribers were active subscribers on the date of peak visitor location register (VLR).

VLR is a temporary database of the subscribers who have roamed into the particular area, which it serves. Each base station in the network is served by exactly one VLR, hence a subscriber cannot be present in more than one VLR at a time.

The growth in this category was led by Vodafone, which added 3.56 million users to take its subscriber base to 130.92 million users.

Reliance Communications followed next with an addition of added 3.3 million new subscribers, taking its subscriber base to 132.18 million.

Telecom giant Bharti Airtel added 3.2 million subscribers to take its total number of customers to 159 million.

Idea Cellular added 2.51 million subsribers, increasing its subscribers count to 86.8 million while Uninor added 1.27 million subscribers to have 21.57 million subscribers.

According to the data, the broadband subscriber base grew 2.34 percent from 11.21 million in January to 11.47 million in February 2011. However, the wireline segment declined marginally from 34.94 million in December to 34.87 million at the end of February.