3G in North America closing in on 50%

[Fire14]

North America - 3g Penetration Approaches 50%

Three months ago, we reported that CDMA customers in North America had grown to account for more than 50% of the regional total for the first time. That growth continued into the second quarter, the proportion rising from 50.3% to 50.6% over the three month period, as did the growth of GSM technology which contributed 38.8% of the North American total at the end of June, up from 38.5% at the end of March.

In terms of growth over the last year, GSM and CDMA are almost neck and neck, GSM claiming a small edge with a 15.5% uplift in customer numbers in the 12 months to 30th June 2007, ahead of CDMA with 15.0%. Giving ground were the AMPS/TDMA networks - where customer numbers decreased by more than half from 12.0 million to 5.5 million over the year - and, to a lesser extent, SprintNextel's iDEN network where customers fell 6.4% to 20.8 million. At the end of June 2007, these two declining technology groups contributed 2.1% and 7.9% of the total, respectively.

W-CDMA customers continued to grow in number in North America, registering an increase in excess of 800% in the year and 69% in the quarter to end Q2 2007 at 1.4 million. AT&T remains the only US carrier to have launched the technology, whilst Rogers in Canada is the only GSM provider in that country and so will remain unrivalled in terms of the W-CDMA service it launched late last year.

3G customers in the GSM family in North America are still outnumbered many times over by their counterparts in the CDMA camp, where customer numbers on the 1x and EV-DO variants of the technology rose 3.0% in the quarter to 128.3 million. Even on a stricter definition of "3G" which only includes EV-DO customers, W-CDMA users were still outnumbered by almost 25 to one. On this definition, 3G customers grew as a percentage of the total from 12.1% to 13.7% between March and June. On the looser definition the North American market is almost 50% 3G, as the proportion of W-CDMA and CDMA2000 customers in combination rose from 48.7% at the end of the first quarter to 49.4% at the end of the second.

North America - 3g Penetration Approaches 50%

[RJB]

HAHA and there is talk of 4g soon haha

[Mobile Mike]

Originally Posted by RJB

HAHA and there is talk of 4g soon haha

No kidding!!!

Although it is good to know 3G has reached this threshold.