Tiwary in Calcutta on Friday. A Telegraph picture

Calcutta, March 26: MTS, the mobile service brand of Sistema Shyam TeleServices, has got nearly one-fourth of its total subscribers from Bengal within 11 months of entering the state.

The growth is attributed to the initial plan of one million minutes of free talk time offered by the CDMA service provider to woo customers.

MTS has around 4 million subscribers in 11 circles of which about 9 lakh are from Bengal.

The company launched services in the state in May last year.

“We are growing fast and we aim to grow faster,” Keshav Tiwary, chief operating officer (Bengal, Bihar and Jharkhand) of Sistema Shyam TeleServices, said today.

The company is growing at about 10 per cent month-on-month in the Bengal circle.

However, the state’s share in the subscriber base of other CDMA service providers is not encouraging.

Reliance, the first CDMA operator to enter Bengal, has over 8 million subscribers in the state of its over 100 million users. Tata Teleservices, the second entrant, has over six million subscribers of its over 64-million subscriber base.

“At present, we are present in 11 circles and have plans to complete the rollout in the rest of the 11 circles by the end of this year. The first in line is Andhra Pradesh,” Tiwary said.