50 Million UMTS Customers Worldwide

3G Americas and Informa Telecoms & Media reported that UMTS, the 3G (third generation) evolution for the GSM family of technologies, serves close to 50 million customers today. This number is after anaddition of 33 million customers since the end of 2004.

UMTS (WCDMA) is a 3G-technology in service today by 99 operators in 45 countries worldwide, up from 61 operators offering commercial UMTS service at the end of 2004. Another 59 networks are either in deployment or in pre-commercial or planned stages. In addition, eight operators have been awarded 3G UMTS licenses and there are 72 potential licenses yet to be awarded.

There are also 125 operators in 74 countries worldwide offering commercial EDGE service and another 84 operators in 29 additional countries with EDGE networks planned or already in deployment.

Since Cingular Wireless launched the first wide-scale UMTS network enhanced with HSDPA in December 2005, there have been three additional commercial launches and another 55 operators are currently deploying or planning to launch the GSM evolution to mobile broadband with HSDPA.

It is expected that virtually all UMTS operators will someday upgrade to HSDPA due to significant benefits to both end user and operator, such as download speeds that can eventually average 550Kbps to 1.1Mbps.