Mid-East & Africa Region Reaches 1 Million 3G Users
GSM technology is completely dominant in the Middle East & Africa region, and has always been so since the advent of digital mobile technology. When the legacy analogue networks installed in many of the region's capital cities and main population centres in the 1990s were replaced it was nearly always with GSM based networks. GSM is operational in all 70 of the markets in the region, and accounted for 97.7% of the total MEA customer base at the end of Q3 2006.
This figure is in fact down from 97.8% at the end of Q2 2006 and 97.9% at the end of Q1, which is of course explained by the fact that several of the region's GSM operators have also now launched W-CDMA networks, and these are becoming more established.
In addition to the 242.76m GSM customers at the end of September 2006 there were 1.06m W-CDMA customers, up from 0.48m just three months earlier, accounting for 2.5% of MEA's net additions in the period. With respect to GSM and W-CDMA technology in aggregate there has been no drop in the proportion of the total - in fact it rose from 98.0% to 98.1% between June and September.
Only four of MEA's 70 countries had an operational CDMA network at the end of Q3 2006 - Angola, Ghana, Israel and Yemen. Even in these markets, CDMA is the minority technology, with shares of the market of 34%, 4%, 29% and 20% respetively. (Of course, CDMA is more popular in the region as a fixed-wireless access technology, and the mobile figures do not take these applications into account.)
Indian state controlled company MTNL has since become the fifth CDMA mobile player on the continent with a long-awaited service launch taking place on the 15th December 2006; however, we do not expect the technology to capture a significant amount of market share of the Mauritian market either, in the medium term. All in all, CDMA mobile networks had a total of 3.9m subscribers in the MEA region at the end of Q3 2006 - equivalent to 1.6% of MEA customers, but 83% of the non-GSM base.
The rest of the non-GSM base is made up 11% of iDEN customers (in Jordan and Saudi Arabia), 5% of AMPS/TDMA customers and 1% by residual analogue customers.
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Posted to the site on 23rd January 2007