3G creating opportunity for operators to gain market share

March 13, 2005

Research and Markets has announced the addition of 3G: Taking Mobile to the Next Level to their offering.

3G mobile is now well established in leading countries in Asia and is being broadly deployed in Europe. These new services offer a broad variety of new services that are moving the 3G mobile carriers from being voice providers to being data and multimedia service providers. This is a quantum leap that will more than overcome the declining revenue from voice services and continue the growth that mobile service providers are experiencing in both subscribers and revenue.

This report examines the strategies of 23 3G service providers globally. It reviews technical and regulatory issues and examines the trend toward network integration. The report analyzes the effect of 3G services on operator's ARPU. A global forecast is provided as well as regional forecasts for Asia, Europe, North America, and the Rest of the World that includes 3G service provider subscriptions and revenue as well as handset shipments.

This report finds that 3G will cause mobile ARPU's to grow in the face of declining voice revenues and that, after 2007, 2G subscribers will begin to decline in numbers as they shift to 3G services. The report points out that the switch to 3G is creating an opportunity for mobile operators to gain market share or for new carriers to establish themselves in the mobile market.