Vodafone and Latin America’s America Móvil kept second and third rankings, but India’s Bharti Airtel replaced Telefónica at No. 4, and it’s within spitting distanced of breaking into the top 3. Asian operators China Unicom, China Telecom, Indonesia’s Telkomsel and India’s Idea Cellular all rose in the rankings. Meanwhile, Verizon Wireless, AT&T, T-Mobile-owner Deutsche Telekom, and Russia’s VimpelCom and Sistema groups all fell in the chart.

Every single one of these carriers saw its customer base grow, but in general Asian operators saw much faster growth. That makes sense since many Asian countries are still far from reaching the mobile saturation levels of the west.

The big exception was France Telecom, which fell off the list completely last year but returned in the No. 12 slot. Though on paper FT’s total global subscribers by 57 percent, that performance has more to do with Wireless Intelligence’s methodology than any spectacular performance by FT’s Orange properties. WI only counts connections if a carrier group owns a majority stake in an operator (for instance Verizon’s subscribers don’t count toward Vodafone’s total). FT recently upped its ownership in several operators over 50 percent, which accounts for the huge subscriber boost.

It’s also important to note that connections don’t always translates into revenues. Verizon and AT&T rank 16^th and 18^th in total connections respectively, but they’re Nos. 2 and 3 in total revenues. In terms of revenues, Verizon is larger than its parent Vodafone, even though Vodafone has more than three times as many customers. As Wireless Intelligence points out, North American operators have a particular knack for making more money on each connection.

Photo courtesy of Shutterstock user Kittisak

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That’s pathetic, as there are five major telecommunication companies in India: Bharti, Reliance, Tata and state-owned BSNL & MTNL. There’s no reason why there aren’t more broadband users in India — in particular, those big phone companies should be aggressively subsidizing the newer, more powerful sub-$500 netbooks that come with 10-inch screens.

While it could help boost Nokia’s revenues, more importantly, it could jumpstart the Indian Internet ecosystem, which is already vibrant even despite such low broadband and PC penetration. Take a look at this presentation from Trendspotting about the state of India online to see just how engaged the region’s Internet users are. There are about 54 million active Internet users in India, according to the report, who love to search on Google, watch a lot of video on YouTube and are completely smitten with Facebook (the number of Indian users has risen 156 percent in the past 12 months alone). And when it comes to Twitter users, the country figures among the Top 10 in the world.

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Mugs: What can’t I see online from Fox?

Hardie: You can’t see anything with lots of music content just because we can’t get the rights. We think that anything freely available over the air should be freely available online.

Mugs: Why no Mad Men or Project Runway online?

Jeff: The cable operators pay for that content and won’t allow us to give that content out freely on the Internet. While we own the rights in terms of talent, our limitations are the rights with out cable partners to display that online. To monetize that content, we had to change our content to fit it in under the terms of our contracts, so our content is under three minutes.

Mugs: What kind of content strategies can we expect from YouTube with regard to mainstream TV content?

Ben: About 280 million monthly viewers. We really want to provide the best distribution method possible for online media, whether it’s premium or user-generated. CBS sells the ads for their content today. We enable content producers to know who their viewership is.

Mugs: Who’s watching what on Fancast and how are you different from Hulu?

Karin: We have lots of relationships with a variety of video providers, rather than a Hulu which is anchored by two content providers.

Mugs: What content works best on the Internet with ad or subscription?

Greg: I think the aggregation model is the way the world will go. Some will be premium content, subscription, but most will be ad-supported. There’s also the potential for upsell on the these sites. Retailers want to flash people the opportunity to buy the content and will pay for that. We will probably see three or four aggregators and they will need to provide a good user experience. Then the Hulus and broadcast sites will be source feeds into those sites.

Karin: People use the web as an opportunity for catching up. Sunday our traffic spikes. There are plenty of comedies and shows where you need to catch up. Before the Internet would show serialized content, a show whose ratings started to slip was gone, but now with the ability to grab content and catch up…

Mugs: How does the traffic on Fox.com compare to Hulu?

Hardie: Fox.com gets more traffic. Given that, there are a few odd shows that become successful online, such as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

Mugs: Why don’t you take overlay ads?

Fox: We don’t take overlays on the content because it ruins the content environment and we have other guild issues that gets complicated.

Mugs: What is the future of buying video content?

Greg: Clearly demographics are becoming very important. Our clients are getting very sophisticated in the customer demographics and are segmenting their audience. But younger folks, if you give them a lot for free and then give them hard goods, they will pay for them. Maybe that’s a business model for the future.

Mugs: What’s good about broadband video today?

Greg: Good news is if you are in the digital business, the budgets are not being cut in the digital business. Eventually the analog dollars and digital pennies will flip.

Karin: It’s good that content makers are at least putting the content out there and by doing that are realizing it’s not a bad thing.

Ben: Winners are content producers who can reach a larger audience and the consumers who get more choice and access.

Jeff: From a programming side, the Food Network has gotten the highest ratings ever. The audience is watching more on TV and more online. We’re getting good online CPMs. The early adopters have adopted online video and fast followers are coming. We’re moving past experimentation. We know it works, now we just have to figure out how it will work. Until Hulu started popping on the scene there was no scale and there was no interest.

Hardie: Online video is still so small compared to real TV viewing, but this could be the year. Maybe that will shift. Consumers are watching. And you can’t tell a story that fast.

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He wouldn’t be the first Indian industrialist with global ambitions. More recently, Tata bought out Ford Motors’ Jaguar and Land Rover business for $2.3 billion. Tata and its local rival Reliance have been on a buying binge for a while now, but buying a branded mobile phone maker would be a first for either of them.

“We will be bidding for Motorola’s handset business, but at this point of time I cannot give out the price or the value of the bid,” Dhoot told Dow Jones Newswires. He’s considering using Motorola as the centerpiece of his vertically integrated retail strategy: He already has the licenses to set up a mobile network in India and a network of 1,000 stores across the country — handsets could be the missing piece.

Given that India continues to be one of the fastest growing mobile markets — 251 million connections, at last count — this move shouldn’t come as a surprise. I have been hoping that the massive telecom buildout in India would spur a lot of local innovation and the formation of telecom/networking equipment startups.

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