HSPA: Milestone and bold predictions

GSMA announced last week that the number of HSPA mobile subscribers has reached 50 million. The number of HSPA subscribers last year at around this time was 11 million.

An old slide predicting the rise of HSPA subscribers can be seen above. I dont think that the number of subscribers reached 20 million in 2007 as predicted but they will definitely be more than 60 million by the end of 2008. Around 4 million people are converting to being HSPA subscribers every month.

GSMA also have a site dedicated to HSPA where they also maintain a live counter of the number of HSPA subscribers worldwide.

Finally, here are some HSPA related statistical facts from GSMA website:

• 267 operator commitments in 111 countries
• 191 commercial deployments in 89 countries
• All EU countries have commercial HSPA deployments
• 747 HSPA devices from 114 suppliers including:
  > 281 mobile handsets
  > 68 data cards
  > 120 notebooks
  > 40 wireless routers
  > 72 USB modems
  > 39 embedded modules

GSMA has also claimed that mobile will reach speeds of 100Mbps before landline will. This was in response to BT announcing FTTx technology to be available in 10 million homes by 2012. With the Fibre technology though the initial speeds will be 40Mbps, rising to 60Mbps later on. Sometime (quite far) in future it will eventually achieve 1000Mbps though.

Finally, Global mobile broadband connections in the first quarter of this year rose by 850% from the same period last year, according to Herns Pierre-Jerome, director for wireless broadband technologies of Qualcomm. The rapid growth, he said, illustrated how mobile broadband had become a mainstream data application of third-generation (3G) mobile phone technology, driven primarily by evolution-data optimised (EV-DO) and high-speed packet access (HSPA) systems.

The number of 3G subscribers globally totals 670 million in a market of 3.5 billion mobile users. The figure is forecast to reach 1.6 billion over the next four years, fuelled by declining costs of network equipment and devices. Telecom vendors and operators are expected to realise revenue of US$114 billion from 3G equipment and $394 billion from 3G services. Qualcomm earned $10 billion in revenue in 2007, out of overall industry revenue of $352 billion.