Subject: [NEXTEL-1] It's Official: One Billion GSM Users

From: Marcelrf <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 01 Mar 2004 08:19:29 -0500

February 27, 2004

It's Official: One Billion GSM Users

What is a cell phone user worth?

By William David Gardner

About $277 billion or so " that is, if the user is the one billionth GSM
user. That's the way the Deutsche Bank calculates the worth of the GSM
worldwide annual revenues in a white paper published to commemorate the
milestone reached this week.
In a socio-economic study of the impact of GSM released at the 3GSM
Congress in Cannes, the bank predicted that GSM revenues will reach $500
billion in 2005.

"There are now more GSM mobile handsets in daily use than the total
number of personal computers and televisions combined," the GSM
Association said in announcing the bank's study. "Driven by GSM, the
number of mobile subscribers exceeded the number of fixed telephone
lines for the first time in 2003. In the last 12 months alone, GSM added
nearly 198 million new users."

GSM manufacturers from around the world chimed in to celebrate the
growth of the European-developed standard. The wireless standard came
about after European businessmen complained they had to have a separate
mobile phone for each country as they moved across Western Europe.

Etienne Fouques of Alcatel, president of the Mobile Communications
Group, said the new explosive growth of GSM is located in
lower-penetration countries " primarily China, but also in India,
Russia, Africa and South America. In Latin America GSM, which started
off from a relatively small base, is growing almost 150 percent
annually.

Author of the Deutsche Bank report, Gareth Jenkins, said particularly
far-reaching consequences of GSM are felt in emerging economies. "The
deployment of GSM has helped to bridge the digital divide and bring
modern telecommunications services to chronically under-served
communities in Africa, Asia and Latin America," said Jenkins, who is
senior telecoms analyst at the German bank.

In the U. S. GSM is the underlying technology at mobile phone service
providers T-Mobile, Cingular Wireless, and AT&T Wireless. Verizon
Wireless and Sprint use the CDMA-based standard while Nextel utilizes
its own proprietary scheme.
Jenkins and the GSM Association took advantage of the celebration of the
one billionth GSM user to lord it over its CDMA competition stating that
the some 200 million GSM subscribers signed up in the past 12 months
were "more than the second-placed mobile technology (CDMA) had in its
global customer base at the year-end."

The CDMA standard, however, has recently been coming on strong after its
chief-promoter, Qualcomm, finally emerged from years of agonizing
struggle to bring its standard to market. It has won major contracts in
China and Japan and in the U. S. its robust EV DO high-speed data
service has recently been introduced by Verizon Wireless.

http://www.commweb.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=18201086

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