RSSGSM Expands Lead in Americas
By Ed Oswald | Published August 31, 2006, 3:25 PM
GSM has taken a majority share in North America, according to data released Thursday by industry group 3G Americas. As of the end of the second quarter of 2006, GSM had added 100 million new customers over the past year to end the period with a 51 percent share.
The technology's share grew 13 percent over the past year, further solidifying its lead as the top wireless technology. The group pointed to CDMA's loss of momentum in key countries like Brazil as a reason for GSM's growth, as well as increasing numbers of CDMA operators transitioning to what has become the de facto global standard.
"GSM has overtaken all other wireless technologies and is the consumer's number one choice," 3GAmericas Latin American director Erasmo Rojas said. "As CDMA technology growth loses its momentum in Brazil and across the Americas region, one can clearly see why operators, such as Brazil's market leader VIVO, are choosing to deploy GSM."
North America plays host to the largest CDMA-based operator in the world, Verizon Wireless, with nearly 55 million customers. However, mergers like that of AT&T Wireless and Cingular on the GSM side, as well as migrations from CDMA and TDMA to GSM helped the standard to gain a foothold.
North American additions accounted for one fifth of the total net GSM adds worldwide over the past year, said the group. As of the end of June, 2 billion of the 2.41 billion wireless users worldwide used the technology.
On the data side, HSDPA/UMTS continued to make gains, more than doubling the number of subscribers to 70 million, the group said.
In the quest to claim which technology is better we lose the fact that the driver for technologies are customers. The quest to be always connected the increasing synergy of life and work along with bandwidth intensive applications, which are the driver of higher speeds and reduced latency no matter which technology is employed. These various technologies, GSM, CDMA, EVDO, HSPDA/UMTS will only constitute the access layer in an emerging Architecture for all communications, the first version of the IMS (http://en.wikipedia.org/...IP_Multimedia_Subsystem) standard should be completed late this year. Convergence of Fixed and Mobile networks, IP empowered endpoints, end to end QoS, along with strong applications will continue to drive the industry. USA has always tended to be different from the rest of the world this is also true with respect to the telecoms market. Today Europe and Asia are better barometers for what technologies will be adopted in the rest of the world.
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The first sentence in this article is incorrect. 3G Americas said GSM has taken a majority share in the Americas, not North America. Yes, GSM is the lead technology in Latin America, mainly due to the fact that Mexico's America Movil and Spain's Telefonica, both GSM supporters, are buying up operators throughout Latin America. If those acquired operators are CDMA operators to begin with, their new owners are building them replacement or parallel GSM networks. CDMA is still firmly in the lead in North America and is expected to command market share in that region through 2011, according to most analysts.
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"As of the end of June, 2 billion of the 2.41 billion wireless users worldwide used the technology."
holy crap!
almost half the worlds population has a cell phone.
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Let's not mention the fact that GSM operators will need to transition to a new standard to support high speed data, or that CDMA is a fundamentally superior technology to GSM in many ways (soft handoff, rake receiver, variable power output, enhanced security, enhanced reception, full backwards compatibility).
Trust me, you will not see the big CDMA boys in the US converting from CDMA to GSM, as it is, they are a year ahead of Cingular's UMTS (for broadband speeds) deployment, as EVDO r0 has been nationally deployed on BOTH sprint and verizon.
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Exactly. :)
Heh, and sprint has announced their 3.5G product will be nationwide by Q4 '07 I'm sure Verizon will not stand by idly whilst that happens!
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I think the uptake of GSM in the US is largely due to the fact that, on the whole, the rest of the world uses it - therefore, most handsets come out in GSM first, then CDMA (if at all).
Of course, there are similar arguments pro-GSM, it's swings and roundabouts.
For the above reason, UMTS is likely to suceed over EVDO, as it is already established in Europe, and most new 3G handsets are designed for it.
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I have an LG CU500 HSPDA phone with Cingular and I have absolutely no dropped calls when the phone switches back and forth from HSPDA/UMTS towers to EDGE. It would seem the soft handover advantage you mention with CDMA is no longer an advantage.
As for enhanced security with CDMA, that is a complete lie. There is no better way to have secure phone communications than to use a sim card that can be swapped easily between phones. This effectively prevents cloning.
The only reason CDMA has enhanced reception is largely because Verizon (and possibly others) STILL uses obsolete, inferior analog service in some areas. If you have a phone such as the CDMA Motorola RAZR phone that only supports digital service you lose the so-called enhanced reception.
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How little you know...
Enhanced security with CDMA is not a complete lie. Go read up on how the technology actually works and maybe you'll realize this. As for cloning, a SIM card is basically an electronic serial number that you can remove from the phone. If someone knows what they're doing, they could probably clone your phone in minutes.
And by the way, when I say CDMA has enhanced reception, I don't mean analog, I mean CDMA. Capacity is 4 times that of GSM per tower. Less towers are required. Rake receivers and being able to talk to multiple towers at once all give CDMA the edge over GSM.
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GSM 850 MHz is on a par with CDMA in terms of digital reception. As far as security, how is it more secure to have that electronic serial number hard coded into the phone vs having a removeable serial number in the form of a sim card? If someone has a GSM phone without a sim card the phone is completely useless for making and receiving calls. Not so with CDMA.
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