Russia & Central Asia Q4 2006 - GSM Slips Slightly

GSM dominates the mobile market in Russia & Central Asia, with all but 1.4m of the region's 171.7m mobile connections at the end of 2006 being accounted for by the global standard technology. There was, however, a very small shift in the trend in Q4 2006: the proportion of the customer base made up of GSM customers - which has been growing steadily over the years - actually fell.

However, if this represented a chink of light for GSM's competitors it was certainly a small one, as the proportion of connections accounted for by non-GSM technologies increased by only 0.01pp from 0.81% to 0.82%. In fact, if W-CDMA connections are included the chink was not there at all, with a steady 99.21% of RCA mobile connections on one or other of the standards at the end of both September and December.

The absolute decline in non-GSM customer numbers is down to the demise of Russia's AMPS/TDMA networks, whose customers are mostly migrating onto more modern GSM networks as coverage improves. That said, NMT customer numbers declined more quickly in Q4 2006 with a 16% loss, against a decrease of 13% in the AMPS/TDMA base.

W-CDMA was the fastest growing technology by customer numbers, with an increase of 83%, although in absolute terms the base only reached 53k by the end of the year - all in Takijikstan, and just 0.03% of the regional total.

CDMA was the fastest growing technology group of any size, with a 9.7% increase in Q4 2006 to 1.08m, although this was down on 9.8% in Q3 2006 and 16.1% in the Q4 2005. The vast majority of CDMA customers in Russia & Central Asia were using CDMA2000 1x technology at the end of 2006, with only 6% of the CDMA base remaining using legacy cdmaOne technology. Of the 1.01m CDMA2000 customers at the end of last year, just over 2% were using EV-DO capable equipment.

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"

Posted to the site on 18th April 2007