EDGE and WCDMA complementing each other

December 9, 2004

Mobile operators in both saturated markets and emerging ones continue to build towards a totally cellular world, infrastructure vendors will be the benefactors throughout the decade. Hundreds of thousands of base stations will be deployed annually until the end of the decade, according to the just published study "World Mobile Infrastructure Report."

Research and Markets has announced the addition of World Mobile Infrastructure 2005 to their offering

"There are really a couple of distinct markets out there today for infrastructure vendors," said the author. "Operators in developed markets will begin to bear the fruit of 3G infrastructure investments beginning next year and will continue to build out those networks as they bring subscribers over from their existing networks. Emerging markets will complete the first swath of redundant and competitive national services near the end of the decade through the use of 2G and 2.5G air interfaces. All of this bodes well for the infrastructure vendors and those associated with cellular sales."

According to the report, both EDGE and WCDMA will do well as 3G alternatives with the two complementing each other in some cases, while CDMA2000 and GSM/GPRS systems will also be abundant in 2009 as over 2.4 million base stations deployed worldwide serve over 2.1 billion cellular subscribers. The report found that many operators are not concerned with WCDMA at this time due to the fiscal constraints of their markets in many cases, and are turning to GSM/GPRS and EDGE while other operators, in more lucrative markets, are already serving or will serve subscribers well through WCDMA deployments.

The report details subscriber and base station growth through 2009 by air-interface and region and also calculates high-speed data users including mid-speed GSM/GPRS subscribers and CDMA2000 high-speed users. The world's regions are broken down including a discussion of growth, which air-interfaces will likely be mostly utilized throughout the regions and how the 2G, 2.5G and 3G infrastructure will be deployed from 2004-2009. Also explained are those operators and regions that are influencing which 3G air-interfaces are being deployed and how purveyors of CDMA2000, GSM/GPRS, EDGE, and WCDMA will fare overall.

Questions Addressed

- Will WCDMA succeed outside of the US, Europe and Japan?

- What impact will EDGE have on the market?

- Can CDMA2000 expand beyond its existing core markets?

- Will growth continue unabated in China?

- Is India the next China?

- Can emerging markets match the penetration of Europe and Japan?

- Will infrastructure deployments face a ceiling in the future?