Europe : In Q4 2006, only one quarter of the net new mobile connections made in Europe was 3G enabled. In the first quarter of 2007, just over two in five connections were to a W-CDMA network, but the majority of the additional customers were still GSM. In the second quarter of 2007, for the first time, the majority of net additions were to W-CDMA services, with 8.0m of the 14.5m new connections made being 3G capable – a proportion of 55%.

This is also the highest quarterly net additions figure for 3G recorded in Europe so far, exceeding the 7.3m registered in Q4 2006. Correspondingly, the GSM net additions figure in this latest quarter was the lowest recorded since the advent of 3G. Of course, in reality the situation is not “either/or” – the sale of a piece of 3G-capable end-user equipment officially makes the user of the equipment a 3G customer, but in the vast majority of cases that piece of equipment will also be capable of connecting to GSM networks as well.

It is also worth pointing out that a 3G net addition is often simply an existing GSM customer who is upgrading to a 3G handset: to say that 55% of net additions in the second quarter in Europe were 3G is not, therefore, to say that 55% of Europeans who signed up for a mobile service for the first time between March and June chose a 3G service.

In proportionate terms, the W-CDMA customer base in Europe grew in size by 15.6% in Q2 2007, which was in fact slightly down on the 16.0% recorded in Q1 2007. The performance takes the annual growth rate for W-CDMA to 90%, compared to a 9.1% increase in the GSM base between June 2006 and June 2007. At the end of the second quarter 2007, 8.7% of mobile connections in Europe were 3G enabled, up one percentage point from 7.7% at the end of the first quarter, and up 3.5pp from 5.2% at the end of the second quarter 2006.

Correspondingly, the percentage of the total customer base made up of GSM customers fell from 94.6% to 91.1% over the year to 30th June 2007. The remaining 0.2% of the European total was made up two thirds of CDMA customers, who grew in number by 28% in the year to just under 0.9m, and one third of analogue customers, who declined in number by almost 10% to 0.46m. In total there were over 59m W-CDMA customers in Europe at the end of Q2 2007, which together with the CDMA total (almost all of which is CDMA2000) took the European 3G total a whisker over 60m. As for GSM, the base went through 600m at the end of 2006 and grew by 15.7m in the first half of 2007 to reach 619.9m.

The above article is taken from The Mobile World click here to see more