Mobile Wireless Communications Today
by Puneet Gupta
Mobile Wireless Market: Technology Forecasts
In the last few years the traffic increases in the mobile networks and the number of subscribers has been greater than anticipated. Infact in many places the mobile penetration has grown to more than 50%. In this section I'll talk about the existing market for the 2G technologies as well as forecasts for these technologies and the third generation networks.
What looks clear is that after coexisting with the digital technologies for a few years (3-5) we'll see a disappearance of the analogue technologies. According to the latest updates from [2], the number of digital cellular subscribers is expected to double from around 624 million in early 2001 to over 1.14 billion at the beginning of 2003 and may move up to 1.62 billion at the beginning of 2005. At the same time we'll see the number of analogue cellular subscriptions falling from 80 million at the beginning of 2001 to 37 million by the beginning of 2003 and 14 million by the beginning of 2005.
The current second generation technologies, thanks to the continuos improvements and 2.5G overlays should be viable in the medium term and continue to win market share for at least next five years. Also, the 3G technologies should not have any major impact till 2003 and then coexist with 2G technologies for another 2 to 3 years before gaining prominence. 3G related work is still going on and Japan could be among the very first countries with commercial 3G roll out, as early as 2002. The next graphic shows a distribution of cellular subscribers across various regions of the world and the forecasts for future.
According to the coverage and the subscriber numbers world wide, GSM comes out as a clear winner in digital technologies. Today 89% of all cellular subscribers are using digital technology and around 65% of these are GSM subscribers, with CDMA and D-AMPS having around 13-14 % of digital subscribers each.
As the number of digital subscribers grows by almost 100 % by 2003 the subscriber ratio is expected to remain the same. 3G should begin showing it's presence but with a very small number of subscribers till 2003 and a subscriber base of under 2.5% till 2005.
Global Forecasts By Technology
Source: mobile@ovum
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2001
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2002
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2003
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2004
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2005
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Total subscriptions at 1 January (thousands)
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703,870
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940,226
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1,180,694
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1,406,284
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1,616,125
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Total analogue
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80,157
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61,220
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37,400
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20,111
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13,998
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Total digital
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623,714
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879,006
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1,143,294
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1,386,174
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1,602,126
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GSM
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406,605
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566,176
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730,449
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875,608
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991,706
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CDMA
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86,797
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128,155
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167,744
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202,662
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230,671
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PDC
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48,742
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53,973
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60,084
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63,677
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66,141
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D-AMPS
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81,569
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130,691
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182,444
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228,707
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274,182
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Third-generation
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0
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11
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2,573
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15,519
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39,426
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Next: The Standards Debate
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