UMTS Forum Report 36, June 2004

Introduction

'The year 2002 marked an historic turning point in the history of telephony, for it was the year when mobile subscribers overtook fixed-line subscribers worldwide. The rise of mobile telephony to overtake fixed has brought with it a huge number of implications, but perhaps the most significant impact is on access, both to basic telecommunication services, and to information and communication technologies (ICT), as a tool for economic and social development' .

Data for the period 1999-2002 for 200 of the world's economies covering 99.98% of the world's population shows that growth in global ICT diffusion has been spectacular and that 'the greatest dynamism was exhibited by the growth cellular mobile subscribers ' Of the 6.2 billion people in the world, 1 in every 5 is a cellular mobile telephone subscriber, up from 1 in every 12 three years ago. In this period, the number of cellular mobile telephone subscribers grew 134 percent, outpacing the 21 percent growth of the number of main telephone lines in operation. Since 1999, there have been 662 million additional cellular mobile telephone subscribers, many more than the 192 million main lines added during the same period' .

End 2002 the number of cellular mobile telephone subscribers exceeded the number of main telephone lines in operation in 125 economies. Among these economies, 40 are high income, 49 middle income and 36 low income economies. In Italy the difference between the number of mobile subscribers and the number of fixed subscribers is as much as approximately 25 million, in Mexico close to 11 million and in Indonesia nearly 4 million.

In just three years (1999-2002) at least 69 economies doubled the number of their cellular telephone subscribers and 66 economies added at least 1 million subscribers. China, India, Brazil and the Russian Federation, some of the largest countries in terms of population, added 210 million mobile subscribers. Developing countries, such as Mexico or Morocco for example experienced impressive growth as well.

The number of mobile users will continue grow significantly. It was well over 1 billion end 2002 and should double between 2002 and 2009 to reach approximately 2.1 billion end 2009. The penetration rate, just over 5% end 1998 could exceed 32% in 2009. During the period 1998-2003 the average annual growth rate was nearly 33%, it is expected to be slightly less than 9.5% between 2004 and 2009.

GSM is the dominant technology in 2003.

End 2003, Western Europe leads the market in terms of penetration rate and should maintain its leadership in the forthcoming years. In terms of regional distribution of worldwide cellular users, Asia-Pacific is the unquestionable leader end 2003 with 36.3% of the total cellular user base and its share should be over 42% end 2009.

According to Strategy Analytics, worldwide cellular service revenues should raise from US$ billion 463.1 in 2003 to US$ billion 758.4 in 2009. Gartner Dataquest estimates that total revenues from mobile terminals stand at US$ billion 97.3 in 2003 and would be approximately US$ billion 93.7 in 2007. The total mobile infrastructure market represents US$ billion 36.9 in 2003 and should reach more than US$ billion 37 in 2007. Thus the combined market for mobile services, terminals and infrastructure amounts increased to approximately US$ billion 600 in 2003, representing about 2% of the 2002 worldwide GDP.