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Asia-Pacific CDMA Growth Slows to an All-Time Low
GSM continues to increase its dominance of the Asia Pacific market. Of the 99m new connections made in the quarter, only 13m chose any other standard and of those, 11.3m went for the GSM-enhancement, W-CDMA. Nearly 80% of all customers in the region now use GSM - 1.232bn out of 1.545bn - with CDMA the only other real contender. At the end of June, there were 191.3m customers connected to the various forms of this standard slightly up on the 189.4m at the end of March.
The writing is clearly on the wall as far as CDMAÃ's future is concerned. This is perhaps best seen when we consider the fate of its 3G variant CDMA 1x EV-DO. During the quarter, just 0.21m new EV-DO connections were made, a small fraction of the 11.3m who chose W-CDMA.
According to its supporters, EV-DO has advantages over W-CDMA, but it has lost the commercial battle at least as comprehensively as another better standard from some years ago, SonyÃ's ill-starred Betamax. To be fair, the 0.21m number is slightly misleading, as it masks an interesting change taking place in the market. Two of the largest CDMA operators are seeing continuing growth in their EV-DO bases (KDDI in Japan and LG in South Korea) which added 778k and 329k EV-DO connections respectively, but most of the good work here was undone by the two other Korean operators SK and KTF, which are both moving to W-CDMA and disconnected 532k and 340k customers respectively. The two businesses were material contributors to W-CDMA growth adding 1.81m and 1.84m respectively.
NTT DoCoMo is another major supporter of W-CDMA and this now accounts for 45.2m of its 53.6m total base. The balance is made up of 2G PDC customers. This technology is now in terminal decline as Softbank Mobile, the only other company to use PDC, is making the same changes as DoCoMo, adding 1.1m W-CDMA customers in the quarter while disconnecting another 580k from the PDC net.
Two other technologies are in use in the region, AMPS and its digital variant, TDMA. There are now just 0.4m subscribers to these systems and soon, there will be none.
Posted to the site on 1st October 2008
This article was extracted from The Mobile World Briefing, the weekly newsletter from The Mobile World.
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