Thursday, July 19, 2001

Wireless Subscriber Penetration to Reach 21% by 2006

According to the Yankee Group, at the end of 2000 there were approximately 625 million wireless subscribers across the globe. In a global study of wireless usage across all regions of the world, the Yankee Group found that current wireless penetration was 10.6%, and the company believes that global penetration of wireless subscribers will reach 21% by 2006—more than doubling to approximately 1.3 billion subscribers.

The Yankee Group expects the majority of the rapid growth in coming years to occur in the less developed regions, especially Latin American and Asia, as wireless phones increasingly serve as the consumer's initial entrée into the world of voice telephony in many regions where landline phone service is not available. To illustrate the extent to which wireless usage will become the dominant method of voice communication globally, the Yankee Group has developed a forecast of wireline access lines versus wireless subscribers. In this forecast, the Yankee Group predicts that global wireless subscribers will overtake the number of wireline access lines by 2006.

In addition, the Yankee Group study found that second-generation (2G) digital is the predominant technology across the globe, with approximately 89% of subscribers using digital handsets. Virtually all of the remaining 11% of wireless customers still operate on first-generation (1G) analog networks. The majority of these customers are in Latin America and the United States, which both have at least 30% of customers still using 1G analog handsets (30% and 38%, respectively); these customers are being rapidly migrated to digital. Currently, there are no customers commercially using 2.5G or 3G services, but the Yankee Group believes this will change dramatically over the next couple of years. By the end of 2002, the Yankee Group expects 10% of global subscribers to be using next-generation technologies.

Finally, the Yankee Group predicts that we will end the year 2001 with more than 770 million subscribers globally, an impressive 12.6% penetration of the world's 6 billion people.