Bangkok--27 Oct--Farh Agency
As migration from 2G to 3G accelerates, mobile handsets are evolving from being simple devices for phone calls to advanced communication tools that offer instant access to people, information, personal resources and media anywhere in the world. They are ‘always with us’ and ‘always connected,’ providing access to thousands of applications from multiple industries.
Yet, this is just the beginning, as millions of connected devices in all shapes and forms, such as eReaders, smartphones, tablets, machine-to-machine modules, to name a few, are emerging on the mobile landscape in greater numbers.
At the epicenter of this revolution is CDMA2000, the first technology to enable 3G services. CDMA2000 is experiencing strong growth in global markets and its family of standards is expected to evolve well into the next decade. Besides providing affordable voice, multimedia and broadband data services, many other applications like remote health care, distance learning, and wirelessly-connected consumer electronics, automobiles and energy grids, are cultivating major growth opportunities for 3G CDMA.
Concurrently, LTE is beginning to make its mark on the wireless landscape, building on the success of 3G and leveraging its mature mobile broadband business models. While 3G will continue to deliver voice services most efficiently, 4G will complement 3G in delivering high-rate data services to densely populated urban areas. To satisfy the growing demand for data applications, 3G and 4G networks will co-exist for many years to come as 3G networks provide ubiquitous voice and broadband data services, as well as global roaming, to sustain profitability and fund the build-out of the nascent 4G broadband data networks.
All 3G paths lead to LTE, whether you’re a CDMA2000 operator or not. The combined 3G/4G business opportunity is expected to grow from 1 billion subscribers this year to 4.5 billion in the next five years. To attain these massive numbers, seamless interworking between 3G and 4G will be extremely important to deliver an expected and compelling user experience.
For existing 3G operators to drive economic growth, the ‘smart money’ is being invested in incremental 3G network upgrades and overlaying them with LTE. Replacing one network with another is wasteful in today’s highly competitive market. For investors, evolutionary upgrades are always preferred to revolutionary upgrades.
Strong Global Market Position
CDMA2000 continues to strengthen its position by providing affordable voice and broadband data services across a diverse selection of markets. Up to 314 operators in 120 countries have deployed CDMA2000, and another 26 operators are deploying the technology. Globally, the total number of CDMA2000 subscribers reached 550 million in June 2010 and is projected to grow to 800 million subscribers within the next five years.
The number of EV-DO mobile broadband subscribers is also growing rapidly. As of June 2010, 148 million people worldwide are using EV-DO broadband data services offered by 168 service providers. This number is expected to grow to 629 million by 2015.
CDMA2000 is strongly entrenched across Asia, with 84 CDMA networks and 314 million subscribers in the Asia-Pacific region. China Telecom is adding around 3 million CDMA2000 subscribers to its network every month, reaching 80 million at the end of August 2010. India, the second largest CDMA market in the world, now has over 110 million CDMA subscribers and Southeast Asia markets such as Indonesia and Vietnam are also growing rapidly, with Thailand poised for significant growth.
In Africa, 64 operators have launched CDMA2000 in the 450 MHz, 800 MHz, and 1900 MHz bands. With enhanced efficiency on CDMA2000 1X, operators can provide basic voice communications most affordably and EV-DO is meeting the increasing demand for data applications.
In North America, Sprint and Verizon Wireless have seen strong growth in broadband data services, contributing more than 30% to its total ARPU and rising. In Latin America, a number of countries including Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador and Argentina are using CDMA2000 in the 450 MHz band, known as CDMA450, to bridge the digital divide with affordable universal services.
Continual and Intelligent Evolution
There are two major evolutionary paths for CDMA2000, one for voice and the other for data.
For voice services, 1X Advanced will quadruple the current capacity of CDMA2000 1X networks to free up valuable spectrum resources for EV-DO data services. Putting this in perspective, 1X Advanced will support more telephone calls than GSM by a factor of 50.
With regards to delivering broadband data services, EV-DO Rel. 0, Rev. A and Rev. B are already commercially available, and next year DO Advanced will quadruple data network capacity in congested areas by introducing several new ‘smart network’ techniques. Small and distributed cells will also play a key role in fulfilling the growing demand for data. Heterogeneous networks, consisting of microcells, pico cells and femto cells, will meet the demand by bringing the network (with additional bandwidth) closer to the end user. Meanwhile, Wi-Fi hotspots will help offload cellular network traffic and LTE will supplement 3G networks by providing additional broadband capacity where needed.
Opportunity across Multiple Industries
CDMA has garnered a strong share of the machine-to-machine (M2M) market. Delivering innovative services, such as remote healthcare, smart grids, and consumer telematics, is further driving the demand for ‘everything wireless.’ CDMA2000 is well suited to provide applications and services for M2M, thanks to its ubiquitous coverage, affordability, reliability, network longevity, data speeds and built-in position location capabilities. A robust ecosystem has emerged around CDMA2000 products and services. Across the globe, users and solution providers are choosing CDMA networks to manage their M2M applications. In 2009, CDMA2000-enabled M2M devices increased by 23.7 percent.
The wireless industry is working to meet the unprecedented demand for ‘everything wireless’ and to ensure a seamless integration between 4G and existing 3G networks. CDMA2000 will continue to thrive and its evolutionary enhancements, including LTE, will service network operators for a long time to come.
More information about CDMA2000 is available at www.cdg.org.
For further information, please contact:
Mr. Brad Shewmake Ms. Voraparn Eua-arporn (COCO)
CDMA Development Group Farh Agency
Tel: +1 858-735-8748 Fax: +1-714-545-4601 Tel: 0 2616 0991-2 Fax: 0 26160993
Email:
[email protected] E-mail:
[email protected],
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