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Mid-East & Africa - Technology Round Up
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% net additions W-CDMA, Q3 04 - Q1 07
Customers, EOP by Technology
Of the 25.7m new mobile connections established in the Middle East & Africa in Q1 2007, only 91.5% were GSM, down from 94.4% in the previous quarter. The reason for the decline was a sharp increase in the proportion of net additions accounted for by W-CDMA customers, which rose from 2.9% to 6.2% between Q4 2006 and Q1 2007. The result meant that the proportion of the total MEA customer base made up of W-CDMA customers rose from 0.77% to 1.23% between December and March, the trend back on track after 3G additions fell disappointingly short in the last quarter.
The share of the total held by GSM and W-CDMA technologies in combination fell again in Q1 2007 for the fifth successive quarter, although only by 0.02pp from 97.83% to 97.81%. This implies that other technologies, most particularly CDMA, marginally increased their influence in the mix, and indeed they did, mainly thanks to continued growth in the large networks in Sudan and Angola.
As a proportion of total net additions, however, the number of CDMA and other connections fell from 2.6% in Q4 2006 to 2.3% in Q1 2007.
In absolute terms, MEA ended Q1 2007 with 3.74m W-CDMA customers, up almost 1.6m on the 2006 year-end figure. A further 5.63m CDMA2000 1x connections at the end of the March quarter left the 3G customer base for the continent at 9.38m - just over 3% of the total base of 305m connections. For those who prefer a more conservative definition of 3G, and who include only EV-DO enabled CDMA customers in this category, the total was just under 4.2m. Just under 0.2m of the remainder, or 0.06% of the total, were first generation customers on the continent's remaining NMT, ETACS, AMPS and TDMA networks, and the rest 2G customers mainly using GSM, with a few remaining on cdmaOne and iDEN networks.
Posted to the site on 11th July 2007
This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World.
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