Commercial networks hit 200 worldwide

Caracas Daily Journal: 3G Americas, a wireless industry trade association representing the GSM family of technologies including LTE, announced the milestone of 200 commercial HSDPA networks worldwide in 88 countries, approximately doubling the number of commercial HSDPA networks that were available only one year ago. Based on April 2008 estimates by Informa Telecoms and Media's World Cellular Information Service, there are today more than 217 million UMTS/HSPA 3G subscriptions worldwide up from 100 million subscriptions in January 2007. Chris Pearson, President of 3G Americas stated, "UMTS/HSPA is the global leader in 3G mobile broadband technology and this will continue for at least the next ten years." Informa forecasts that by the end of 2012 there will be 1.3 billion UMTS/HSPA connections, which represents 78 percent of the 3G mobile broadband market. GSM operators worldwide, supporting more than 3.1 billion wireless connections, are choosing the long-term benefits of the 3GPP evolutionary path to HSPA and LTE. It is expected that nearly all UMTS operators will upgrade their networks with HSDPA, and that prediction is quite close to being achieved today. There are 229 commercial UMTS networks, 200 of which are HSDPA commercial networks.