Wireless Networks - Market Growth

In 2001, approximately 1 in 8 people in the world were using mobile telephones. The growth of some vertical wireless data markets is over 80% per year.

Mobile Telephone Service
By 2001, there were 781 million mobile telephone subscribers in the world. Figure 1 shows the recent trend in subscribership to mobile telephone services. Some of the key drivers for continual growth include lower monthly cost of service and pre-paid wireless services. Pre-paid wireless service allows customers with bad or damaged credit to forego the normal credit check required with wireless service and pay for their service before they use it. Many of the new wireless subscribers have credit challenges.


Figure 1: Mobile Telephone Wireless Growth.
Source: GSM MOU

Data Networks
With the demand for high data rate communications solutions, paralleling interest in the Internet, (fueled by easy-to-use application software, its wide array of text, graphics, video and audio content), wireless data market growth has increased substantially. The availability of Internet services over wireless radio channels will be a critical factor in determining overall market growth.

To date, most wireless data applications are non-human in nature. These include applications such as monitoring wireless parking meters, vending machines, and environmental concerns among others. Human access includes the ability to access data available on the Internet, private intranets, new services, and e-mail. The Internet, for example, is being used by businesses for building interactive branding via communication with customers, advertising products and services, publishing product specifications; and acting as a source for point-of-sale applications.

Market growth for wide area wireless data communications services is in the early stages, primarily because wireless data is not yet capable of providing high data transfer rates at a cost comparable to fiber optic cable or wired connectivity. However, the overall market growth of the wireless data market is up. In 1997, there was over 21% growth for circuit switched data (primarily cellular data) and over 89% growth for packet data (ARDIS, RAM, CDPD, and Ricochet).