22 Aug
2005

















this blog

about

site use

contact




archive

2005

earlier





related
sites

Caslon

Ketupa

     CDMA and TeleGeography

CDMA industry consortium the CDMA Development Group (CDG) has announced that the global number of CDMA2000 subscribers rose by 17% in the second quarter of 2005, reaching 185 million.

Around 68% of all CDMA users now access CDMA2000 services; CDMA is currently growing at around 27% annually (with the aggregate CDMA subscriber base estimated at 270 million). Most users are in North America, where the CDMA subscriber base hit the 100 million subscriber mark at the end of June 2005. CDG indicates that 47% of all wireless users in the US and Canada use CDMA technologies: 69% (some 80 million people) access CDMA2000.

There are 116.2 million CDMA subscribers in the Asia-Pacific (43% of the global CDMA subscriber base). 79% of the region's CDMA subscribers use CDMA2000 systems; some 8% subscribe to CDMA2000 1xEV-DO broadband services.

The Latin American region grew to 49.2 million CDMA users during the past year, with 15 million accessing CDMA2000 services. Uptake of CDMA is currently running at around 41% on past figures, reflecting extension of CDMA-based mobile networks.

     TeleGeography

The latest report from telco statistics specialist TeleGeography indicates "maturation" of the global information infrastructure (GII) and the net.

TeleGeography's survey of backbone providers suggests that global cross-border internet traffic grew by 49% in 2005, down from 103% in 2004. The fastest growing regions - Asia (76%) and Latin America (70%) - produced only modest traffic growth by the standards of previous years.

The report argues that the rate of traffic growth will depend on underlying growth in the number of broadband subscribers, which has begun to slow in most developed markets. As of mid-2005 the combined average traffic on all cross-border backbone routes was just under 1 Terabit per second (Tbps), projected to range from 2 to 3 Terabits per second by 2008.

That is a long way from some of the more delirious forecasts that traffic would continue to double every 100 days, one basis for the telco bubble at the turn of the millennium. TeleGeography comments that

An important secondary sign of market maturity is stabilization in Internet backbone access pricing. Its latest pricing survey shows that in the 12 months up to mid-2005, prices fell less sharply than in previous years. In 2004, backbone access prices around the world fell about 50 percent over the previous year. This year prices fell between 23 and 33 percent, and many providers have stated that they have no plans to reduce prices further.