North America Q3 2006 Technology Roundup

North America is the only world region where CDMA is the technology market leader. At the end of September 2006 the CDMA standard, in its various incarnations, accounted for 50.0% of the overall North American market by customers, compared to 47.6% a year earlier, after growth of 19.0% in the year. GSM enjoyed a better proportionate increase, of 25.0% in the year, to improve its overall share of the market from 34.2% to 37.8% by the end of September 2006.

The main loser over the last 12 months has been the AMPS/TDMA family of standards, as customers are actively migrated to more modern networks - mostly of the GSM variety, thereby fuelling the growth of this technology.

For the GSM world, 3G is in its infancy in North America, with only Cingular having launched a W-CDMA network so far, gaining about 300k customers by the end of September 2006 according to The Mobile World estimates.

However, as far as CDMA is concerned, 3G technology has been around for years, with CDMA2000 subscribers accounting for 94% of the overall CDMA base of 122.2m in North America by the end of Q3 2006. Over the year more than 30% of the cdmaOne subscriber base has been eroded, mostly, one would assume, onto the later variants of the technology, leaving just 7.3m using the standard. Of the 115m strong CDMA2000 base, an estimated 18.7m connected with EV-DO capable equipment by the end of Q3 2006, compared to just 3.0m at the end of Q3 2005 - a growth rate of over 500%.

As the chart above, shows, the 3G CDMA subscriber base absolutely dwarfs the embryonic W-CDMA base, to the point where this is not even visible on the scale we have employed. Of course, these are very early days for the 3GSM evolution path in North America, and we expect much stronger growth in the year to come.

However, T-Mobile in the USA and Rogers Wireless in Canada are the only GSM operators of any size other than Cingular and they alone will not provide a challenge to the dominance of EV-DO technology, let alone the CDMA2000 variant as a whole (although some would argue that simple 1x is not "true" 3G), no matter how much they plug the new technology to their subscribers. And this is most likely the way it will stay: as far as we know, none of the continent's big CDMA players have any plans whatsoever to follow their South Korean counterparts to the "dark side" by running W-CDMA networks in parallel with their traditional CDMA infrastructure.

This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World. To download a sample issue of the Briefing in PDF format, please click here. For more information including full subscription pricing, please visit The Mobile World"