Mobile Phone Industry

GSM in the mobile phone industry

GSM is a second-generation digital mobile telephone standard using a variation of TDMA. It is currently the most widely used of the three digital wireless telephone technologies in the mobile phone industry.
 
GSM was initially developed as a pan-European collaboration, intended to enable mobile roaming between member countries.Within a decade, it spread across the globe with nearly 544 operators and 183 countries worldwide and an estimated 991 million subscribers at the end of 2003. As Figure 16 shows, it is all set to cross the one billion mark. Standardization, global roaming, and economies of scale have made this system extremely successful turned it into the catalyst that has shifted large volumes of traffic from fixed networks to mobile networks.

GSM digitizes and compresses voice data, then sends it down a channel with two other streams of user data, each in its own time slot. It operates at in the following MHz frequency bands: 900, 1800 or 1,900.

GSM is the choice of more than 72 percent of world mobile users and is increasing its reach as more and more operators are selecting GSM technology for their networks. GSM is unique for a specific user benefit: international roaming. International roaming enforces compliance with open standards and promotes inter-operability between network and handset equipment from different suppliers. This stimulates competition in the telecom industry and generates economies of scale that reduce costs to manufacturers, operators and, most importantly, the end-users.
Asia-Pacific is steadily closing the gap with Europe, the largest GSM market, while India, Russia, and Latin America all reported growth in excess of 100 percent during 2003. The Asia-Pacific market grew by a CAGR of 60 percent during 1998-2003, while the European market grew nearly 36 percent during the same period.  This fast growth in the Asia-Pacific region was fuelled by China, which is now the largest mobile telecom market (by subscriber) in the world. Figure 17 shows, regional subscriber trends in the adoption of GSM technology.

In terms of sheer pace of deployment, GSM growth in Latin America has been outstanding. GSM now blankets the region while, only five years ago, it was available in just four countries. GSM is also enjoying growing success in North America. In fact, GSM connected more new customers than all other mobile technologies in the second half of 2003.

Across leading GSM players China Mobile Hong Kong, and China Unicom are way ahead in terms of subscriber base. T-mobile and Vodafone networks come close and span across various countries including Germany, UK, Italy and the US.Interestingly T-mobile launched its network two to three years ahead of the Chinese providers.

3G in the mobile phone industry

Even as GSM mobile communications systems make inroads into new markets the mobile phone industry has already started work on the next generation cellular system that can enhance the convenience and magnify the service quality of mobile communications. The increasing demand for higher speed data communications to a wider area of mobile users worldwide has forced the mobile phone industry to look for technological enhancement. 3G   technology will provide the base for the mobile communications infrastructure, combining personal communications with global, mobile, seamless and universal services in the future. 3G offers time and location independent access to an abundance of value-added applications.

The critical factors for the continued success of GSM/3G include:  convergence with other wireless industry technologies, inter-operability and roaming between various platforms; terminal equipment variety for customers, and increasing mobile-centric applications.

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