Digital Lifescapes

Latin American mobile operators are promoting new data services in order to offset falling voice revenues and satisfy the growing demand for value-added products. That helped make 2008 the year of 3G in Latin America, where virtually every Latin American mobile operator launched 3G services. There were more than 6.8 million active WCDMA connections across Latin America at end March 2009, up 50 percent in just one quarter. Possibly the most striking growth of all has been in Brazil, where there were 3.8 million WCDMA subscriptions at end-March 2009, up from 2.2 million three months earlier. "We can expect that number to continue to accelerate, because America Movil has made it clear that its investment priority in the region for 2009 concerns its 3G network," said Eva Benguigui, Senior Research Analyst at Informa. Informa expects investments in 3G networks will accelerate across Latin America. For instance, there will be more than 15 million WCDMA subscriptions in Latin Americ...

The demand for more mobile network backhaul capacity will grow three fold between 2009 and 2013, according to a recent market study by In-Stat. Mobile network operators are deploying EV-DO 2000, HSPA/HSPA+, WiMAX, and LTE to meet the growing demand for high-speed mobile data. In the process, the bottleneck affect of cell site network backhaul has become more prominent. Traditionally, voice has dominated the traffic going across a mobile operator's network. With voice as the primary traffic component, an operator could meet its backhaul requirements with a couple of T-1 lines per base station. That has all changed with operators relying on data for revenue growth. "Cellular and WiMAX backhaul provides that crucial link between the mobile operator's radio access network and its core network," says Frank Dickson, In-Stat's VP of Mobile Internet research. "It does an operator no good to install a base station with 7.2 Mbps capacity if the backhaul is limited to 4...

GSM-HSPA has captured 72 percent of the entire cellular market in the Western Hemisphere. This represents a 6 percent increase in market share since the first quarter of 2008, according to Informa Telecoms & Media. With nearly 555 million subscriptions in the Americas at the end of the first quarter of 2009, GSM achieved an annual growth of 25 percent, adding 110 million new connections in 12 months. On a global basis, GSM and UMTS-HSPA added 680.7 million subscriptions in the year ending March 2009, representing 89 percent global share of market and annual growth of 22 percent. There were 4.16 billion wireless mobile connections worldwide at the end of the first quarter of which 3.7 billion are GSM-HSPA connections. Informa reported 329 million UMTS-HSPA subscriptions as of March 2009, already 8 percent of the global wireless market. This number will exceed 474 million by the end of 2009, and one billion in the year 2012. There are 284 commercial UMTS-HSPA networks today, includi...

WiMAX may be a tale of two markets -- one being WiMAX as an emerging technology gaining momentum, and the other being the larger converging broadband market, where rival mobile broadband system HSDPA and the acceleration of LTE threatens the opportunity for WiMAX in some markets. "It's the best and worst of times for WiMAX," says Mike Roberts, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media. It's the best of times because the WiMAX industry has undoubtedly gained significant momentum in the last year, passing a string of key milestones including product certification, the launch of services by major operators such as Sprint Nextel, commitments to WiMAX by key Internet players such as Google, and the long-awaited arrival of WiMAX notebooks and other devices. WiMAX is also starting to take off in key emerging markets. For example, Informa's forecasts show that WiMAX will account for 24 percent of India's total broadband subscribers by 2013, up from 7 percent ...