CDMA VS GSM: Still a Long Chase

That GSM has more than a five times greater users' base than CDMA is no
news. What is news-however-is that even with this huge base, GSM actually
grew at higher rates than CDMA in 2004, albeit only a little higher rate.

The GSM subscriber base globally, which crossed the one billion mark in
December 2003, reached 1.27 billion by the year end, according to an estimate by
the GSM Association. With a 27 percent growth over 2003 numbers, GSM added a
mind-boggling 270 million subscribers. Almost 20 percent of the world's
population was using a GSM phone by December 2004.

According to the GSM Association, there are nearly 630 GSM networks
worldwide. More than 500 operators have now deployed GPRS, while around 100 have
deployed EDGE (with another 100 planning on deploying EDGE). 

In addition, there
were 60 live 3GSM networks at the end of the year. These were serving at least
16 million 3GSM users.

GSM-CDMA Share in the Indian Cellular Market

On the other hand, the CDMA user base, which was around 227 million by the
end of third quarter of 2004, is likely to have ended the year with around 236
million users (VOICE&DATA estimate), a 26 percent growth over the previous
year. This would mean that the growth of CDMA slowed down in 2004 compared to
2003 when it grew by 30 percent, a rate faster than that of GSM that year.
However, from the CDMA's perspective, what was remarkable last year was the
tremendous growth in CDMA2000 subscriber base that surpassed 127 million users
in September 2004. The CDMA industry as a whole experienced a growth of 14.3
million new users to end the third quarter of 2004 with 227 million subscribers.

Asia-Pacific remains the largest- and fastest-growing region for CDMA with 96
million users, or 42 percent of the total CDMA subscribers. Korea is the largest
market for CDMA (36 million users), followed by China (25 million), and Japan
(18 million). India too is emerging as one of the key markets for CDMA with over
10 million users. More than 68 percent of CDMA subscribers in Asia use CDMA2000,
and in Japan and Korea 87 percent of the CDMA base uses CDMA2000. CDMA has added
nearly 17 million users to reach 88 million in North America. More than 62
percent of CDMA subscribers in the region have access to CDMA2000 networks. The
number of CDMA subscribers in Latin America and the Caribbeans has reached 39
million, representing a 28 percent increase over the previous year. All these
figures are for the third quarter 2004 as the data for the entire year is still
being compiled.

Meanwhile in India...

Throughout the year 2004, Indian mobile services market continued to grow at
a fast pace with both GSM and CDMA adding millions of new subscribers. According
to the latest figures, 1.4 million GSM subscribers were added in December 2004
alone. At 70 percent, the growth rate of the Indian GSM user base was 2.5 times
higher than the global average. Overall, India added 15.45 million GSM users in
2004, more than the entire base of CDMA users.

The CDMA subscriber base, on the other hand, went up to 14.3 million at the
close of 2004 from 8.11 million in 2003, a growth of 76.41 percent. Reliance
Infocomm added .43 million new subscribers in December 2004 to take its total
user base to 10.3 million, according to data released by the Association of
Unified Telecom Service Providers of India. Interestingly, despite a higher
growth rate compared to GSM, CDMA's market share in the overall Indian
cellular pie declined in the past year. From a 27 percent market share in 2003,
CDMA's share came down to 22 percent, while that of GSM increased from 73 to
78 percent.

Ravi Shekhar Pandey