The mobile market may not be as saturated as one might think. Data form Wireless Intelligence shows that less than half of the world has a mobile subscription, with people in developed countries having more than one throwing off penetration calculations.
Once you subtract all of the M2M connections and factor out all of the people who don’t own mobile devices, the number of devices owned by the typical U.S. wireless user comes to one-and-a-half per person.
Chinese and U.S. operators continued to dominate the list of global operators, according to Wireless Intelligence. China Mobile further solidified its top spot in both subscribers and revenue, but most surprisingly Verizon Wireless leapfrogged its corporate parent Vodafone in the fourth quarter in overall revenues.
Mobile data is picking up momentum in Latin America as the number of 3G connections in the region doubled in 2011. Operators in Latin and South America are shutting down their CDMA networks, replacing them with UMTS systems, resulting in a huge surge in data adoption.
China is closing in on the 1 billion mobile connections mark, according to a new Wireless Intelligence report. China has always been a world power in wireless, but it’s set to become more significant still as its huge population embraces mobile data services.
There are more than 5 billion mobile subscribers in the world, and new growth is coming from Asia and Latin America, according to data out on Thursday from Wireless Intelligence, which ranked the top 20 mobile operators by subscribers. U.S. carriers are way down the list.
During the quarter ended Dec. 31 2009, 5.9 million net new subscribers signed up for wireless services, according to data collected by Wireless Intelligence — the highest number of new adds made during a three-month period in three years.
