Global momentum for high speed mobile broadband accelerates on an unprecedented scale
05 May 2006
05th May 2006 - London - The worldwide movement by operators to deploy high speed mobile broadband services - based on the global W-CDMA and HSDPA technology standards* - is fuelling unprecedented economies of scale in the supply of equipment for carriers and handsets for consumers, said the GSM Association (GSMA) today.
According to the GSMA, the global trade organisation for the mobile industry, 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 HSDPA - the next evolution of W-CDMA - 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. Already, 18 mobile networks are providing live commercial W-CDMA/ HSDPA services in 14 countries.
Among the raft of global operator commitments, a number of networks have already announced deployment of W-CDMA/HSDPA in the 850MHz frequency band, including Cingular Wireless, Telstra in Australia and Rogers Wireless - Canada's largest wireless voice and data communications service provider.
"Our plans to introduce a state of the art network based on the world standard for 3G wireless communications - W-CDMA - is a natural progression for Rogers' coast-to-coast GSM/EDGE network," said Bob Berner, CTO of Rogers Wireless. "By deploying HSDPA in the 850MHz frequency band, we will be able to better provide our customers in Canada with advanced mobile services, delivering speeds of up to 1.5 to 2 times faster than those claimed for competing technologies."
This week, mobile operator KTF of Korea also announced that it will switch focus from its CDMA network to a new nationwide W-CDMA/ HSDPA network covering 84 South Korean cities by the end of the year. KTF has cited many compelling reasons for this shift, from simple economic efficiencies and global roaming to global handset availability and choice, economies of scale and significant potential revenue gains from high speed services.
As part of the evolutionary GSM family of technologies, W-CDMA & HSDPA will benefit from the strengths of the global GSM eco-system, such as global roaming and interoperability, open standards and huge economies of scale - evidenced through lower costs for handsets, and greater variety.
More than 315 handset products for W-CDMA are available already from the vendor community, 25 of which are HSDPA ready and a raft of new products are due for shipment in 2006.
"With more than 680 networks in our community heading along this globally agreed evolutionary path, no other technology can match the economies of scale and interoperability generated by GSM's 1.8 billion and growing user base," said Rob Conway, CEO and Board member of the GSM Association. "As economies of scale reach the point of critical mass for suppliers, we will see HSDPA become a ubiquitous part of device product ranges, just as GSM, GPRS and W-CDMA are today."
The CTO of Cingular Wireless, the first network in the world to launch a large scale HSDPA network, Kris Rinne added: "Cingular is demonstrating that HSDPA is a real and robust technology that allows people on the move to enjoy high speed data and multimedia products and services. For us it was about enhancing our broad deployment of EDGE capabilities in the urban and suburban areas - and in technology terms, UMTS (W-CDMA) with HSDPA is uniquely positioned as the only 3G technology that supports both circuit switched voice and high speed packet data."
The trend of operator migration from TDMA, CDMA and PDC to the global mobile path of GSM/GPRS/ W-CDMA & HSDPA continues - as seen across a raft of countries from Australia, Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Columbia, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela, to Japan, Korea, Singapore and the US among many others in recent years. 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.
In terms of global footprint, the GSM world is more than six times bigger than that of the nearest competing wireless technology, with 82% share of the digital wireless market and growing, while market share for other wireless technologies continues to 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.
Notes for editors
*W-CDMA
W-CDMA is the latest addition to the GSM family. W-CDMA enables the provision of mobile multimedia services such as music, TV and video, rich entertainment content and Internet access. W-CDMA is an air interface technology on which 3GSM services are delivered - it is essentially the over-the-air transmission element. Global operators, in conjunction with the 3G Partnership Project (3GPP) standards organisation, have developed W-CDMA as an open standard.
HSDPA
HSDPA = High Speed Downlink Packet Access is a software upgrade for 3G networks based on the W-CDMA air-interface standard, a 3G access technology that has been adopted by the GSM community as a global standard. HSDPA is typically a software upgrade to a W-CDMA network - enabling operators to roll out this high-speed technology rapidly and cost effectively. It doubles network capacity, while making the transmission of everything from voice calls to video pictures more efficient, boosting download speeds as much as fivefold. This well-defined path will result in higher data transfer speeds, improved spectral efficiency and greater system capacity for GSM operators. For users, HSDPA will unlock a world of mobile broadband multimedia services.
For further information contact:
Mark Smith
GSM Association
Tel: +44 7850 229724
Email:press@gsm.org
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