With Bharti Airtel and China mobile soon gearing up to launch 3G technology in the mainstream cellular market, millions of users would soon switch to mobile wireless broadband which would affect wireless market worldwide.
These subscribers are said to have a huge user base in their respective countries. Lets do some number crunching, India has 490 million subscribers and is been adding 14 million subscribers every month. On the side of China, it has a whooping 700 million subscribers base. As of now, there are 169 million users having access to wireless broadband through 3G technology worldwide. With India and China stacking up millions of more users with this technology along with the 4G launch , the number is expected to reach 1 billion by 2012.
“A lot of people in China and India don’t have fixed line connectivity, so they will look to wireless broadband for their future online access,” said Michael O’Hara, chief marketing officer of the GSM Association, a mobile industry group, on the sides of a telecoms industry event this week in Hong Kong.
China Unicom and China telecom, the two rivals for China mobile have already rolled out 3G adding up millions to the list of wireless broadband users.
“Our big commitment is to HSPA,” Manoj Kohli, CEO of Bharti Airtel.
4G is it that big?
The explosion of wireless broadband with the increasing number of supporting devices and co-related applications which optimize high speed connections for streaming videos and many more functions that too all over the cellphone would fuel up the need of faster and better technology.
China Mobile, the world’s top mobile carrier with 500 million subscribers, is already looking forward to expand its technological horizons to 4G technology, and is planning to build a trial LTE network in multiple cities next year, Chairman Wang Jianzhou told reporters this week. Those trials could be followed by the roll-out of a commercial LTE network as early as 2011, said O’Hara of the GSM Association.
Qualcomm, the largest smart phone chip manufacturer hopes to sell millions of the chips worldwide.
Its the matter of time and sooner we could expect the world connected over the mobile wireless connection we just imagined few years back.
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