UMTS: Alive and Well - 4G Americas

of all global consumer traffic. During that same time period, mobile data will increase by 66 times,doubling each year from 2008 to 2013, Cisco predicted. 17As the wireless industry prepares for the deluge of IP data traffic brought on by coming 4Gnetworks, mobile core vendor Starent Networks (now Cisco) prophesized that the flood will comelong before Long Term Evolution (LTE) and WiMAX networks become common. Starent'sJonathan Morgan and Andy Capener said that 3G data traffic had grown at surprising clip in theprevious two years (to 2009) and had the potential to increase at an even faster rate as moreHigh Speed Packet Access (HSPA) technologies came online. "There is a 3G mobile tidal wavecoming," said Morgan, Starent's senior director of product marketing. "In the next five years, wecould see 30 times to 70 times the demand we see today. Much of that will be driven by HSPAand HSPA+ networks." 18CTIA cites the success, innovation and competition in the thriving U.S. market: “Whether it be thealmost 100,000 applications that are now available to consumers since the opening of the firstapplications store 14 months ago, or the launch in the United States of the newest smartphones,or the ability of more consumers in the U.S. than anywhere else on the planet to access thehighest speed wireless networks, or the lowest price per minute of the 26 countries tracked byMerrill Lynch, or the highest minutes of use of those same 26 countries, or the fact that we havethe least concentrated wireless market on the planet, or the evolution in the way services are sold– we are excited to tell the industry’s story. The wireless ecosystem – from carriers, to handsetmanufacturers, to network providers, to operating system providers, to application developers – isevolving before our eyes and this is not the same market that it was even three years ago. In thisindustry, innovation is everywhere.” 19The U.S. is not the only country seeing tremendous success in the industry; however, the U.S.serves as a trendsetter for many other countries, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean.“Latin America has been a growth engine for mobile broadband since HSPA was first launched atthe end of 2006,” stated Erasmo Rojas, director of Latin America and the Caribbean for 3GAmericas. “In a short period of time, there were 52 commercial networks in 24 countries with 15million forecasted subscribers by the end of 2009, adding 5 million subscriptions between Juneand December 2009 alone. It is one of the fastest growing regions in the world as all this wasachieved in only three years.”When considering that there were more than 4.1 billion GSM-HSPA subscriptions worldwide byDecember 2009, including more than 452 million 3G UMTS-HSPA subscriptions, the tremendousopportunity for the uptake of wireless data services and applications is clear. 20In this section, the growing demands for wireless data are demonstrated by examples ofincreased operator ARPU from data services, a variety of 3G applications for consumers and theenterprise and analysts’ predictions for their growth as well as the introduction of a greater varietyof wireless data devices such as smartphones and embedded modules for PC notebooks.17 Cisco: IP Traffic to Hit 667 Exabytes by 2013, Telephony, 9 June 2009.18 Starent preparing for 3G 'tidal wave', Telephony, 19 May 2009.19 CTIA–The Wireless Association® Statement on FCC Open Commission Meeting, CTIA, 27 August 2009.20 World Cellular Information Service, Informa Telecoms & Media, December 2009.www.3GAmericas.org February 2010 Page 27