One hundred million 3G subscribers in Europe

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Five years after the commercial start of the European commercial WCDMA (3G) network, at the end of May there have been more than 100 million people using the light-speed data transfer technology in Europe. According to the report of Informa World Cellular Information Service at the end of May 2008, there were 101.5 million WCDMA subscriptions Europe-wide, which means the 11.1 percent of the 910.8 million active subscriptions. The first commercial network was launched in Italy in the 2003 March, and they still have the largest rate of 3G phones, 28.7%

We can see that in countries where 3 is present, with their offer of cheap data packages, the rate of 3G subscriptions is much higher. Besides Italy, such countries are Great Britain, Austria and Sweden. In Eastern-Europe, the rate of 3G devices is much lower than in Western-Europe. According to Informa's analysis due to the constant price drop of 3G phones, the number of such devices is expected to rise above 10% in Eastern-Europe by 2011.

It's important to note that Informa's report analyzed only the rate of WCDMA-capable devices and cards, but they didn't consider if those were used for data transfer or simple calls. The rate of 3G phone sales has somewhat dropped in Western-Europe too, which is prmarily due to the increased interest for 3G and HSDPA data cards. With the spreading of HSDPA networks and the price drop of mobile data packages the interest for the latter ones is evidently increasing. According to a report from Swedish PTS, in 2007 there has been a 2.1 billion euro revenue from mobile data packages, 5% of which is from traffic generated by USB modems or data cards.


Translated by Szaszati

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