Developing Telecoms | Unprecedented growth for high-speed mobile broadband

24 May 2012

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Unprecedented growth for high-speed mobile broadband

Monday, 22 May 2006 18:22 | Alec Barton

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According to the GSMA, more than 105 mobile networks have launched commercial W-CDMA networks across 50 countries so far. Following the world's first large scale commercial launch of the next evolution of W-CDMA, HSDPA, by Cingular Wireless last year in the US, more than 95 operators from 48 countries are deploying, or have announced plans to deploy the technology. Eighteen mobile networks are already providing live commercial W-CDMA/HSDPA services in 14 countries.

Emerging markets are part of this trend - with pride of place going to Latin America . The trend of operator migration from TDMA, CDMA and PDC to the global mobile path of GSM/GPRS/W-CDMA and HSDPA is being witnessed by a raft of countries featuring Argentina , Bolivia , Brazil , Chile , Colombia, Mexico , Peru , Uruguay and Venezuela .

This ease of migration has been witnessed in the phenomenal growth of markets such as Brazil , which three years ago moved to the GSM family. Today GSM is the market leader, and the choice of more than 50 million users.

GSMA members are confident that, as part of the evolutionary GSM family of technologies, W-CDMA and HSDPA will benefit from the strengths of the global GSM eco-system, e.g., global roaming and interoperability, open standards and economies of scale - evidenced through lower costs for handsets, and greater variety. More than 315 handset products for W-CDMA are available from the vendor community, 25 of which are HSDPA-ready. A further collection of new products is due for shipment in 2006.

In terms of global footprint, the GSM world is estimated by GSMA to be more than six times bigger than that of the nearest competing wireless technology, with an 82% share of the digital wireless market and growing. Market share for other wireless technologies is claimed to be in decline. The scale of GSM growth enables consumers to enjoy unequalled value and variety of products and services, brought to bear by a global eco-system of hundreds and thousands of suppliers, as opposed to the few serving proprietary standards.

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