Nearly 60 Operators on Track for UMTS Enhanced With HSDPA

3G Americas and Informa Telecoms & Media report that UMTS, the third generation evolution for the GSM family of technologies, having already added 33 million customers since the end of 2004, serves close to 50 million customers today. UMTS (WCDMA) is in service today with 99 operators in 45 countries worldwide, up from 61 operators offering commercial UMTS service at the end of 2004. Another 59 networks are either in deployment or in pre-commercial or planned stages. In addition, eight operators have been awarded 3G UMTS licenses and there are 72 potential licenses yet to be awarded.

3G Americas' President, Chris Pearson comments, "There is a clear pathway for accelerating EDGE and UMTS/HSDPA growth globally in 2006. GSM offers economies of scale that are unmatched with more than 1.67 billion customers today, and those economics are following through to the new 3G offerings. Every facet of our successful technology evolution is progressing according to plan and 3G Americas expects 2006 to be a year that highlights the leadership of HSDPA and IMS deployments."

Since Cingular Wireless launched the first wide-scale UMTS network enhanced with HSDPA in December 2005, there have been three additional commercial launches and another 55 operators are currently deploying or planning to launch the GSM evolution to true mobile broadband with HSDPA. It is expected that virtually all UMTS operators will someday upgrade to HSDPA due to significant benefits to both end user and operator, such as download speeds that can eventually average 550-1100 Kbps. In addition to throughput, HSDPA provides both latency and capacity enhancement over UMTS.

Pearson continued, "We expect to see tri-band HSDPA devices in early 2006 providing the vehicle to achieve the unique opportunity for truly mobile broadband services and global roaming on a single device for HSDPA with the ability to fall back to UMTS and EDGE service."

Posted to the site on 10th February 2006