  43.6 million HSPA connections in 2009: IDC
Reported by Industry Standard on Thursday, 19 November 2009 (on November 19, 2009)
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While many businesses struggled to survive the economic malaise, high-speed packet access (HSPA) technology providers enjoyed an increasing customer base. According to a new report from IDC, HSPA technology, in both handsets and dongle form, experienced strong growth in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) in the past 18 months.
The growth had been truly tremendous leading IDC to forecast 43.6 million HSPA connections in the region at the end of 2009.
More investment in LTE
HSPA is becoming very popular and customers are demanding more bandwidth. These factors have led to the need for long-term evolution (LTE) in most of the HSPA markets in APEJ, noted Bill Rojas, research director for IDC's Asia Pacific telecommunications research.
"The experience with HSPA dongles has been nothing less than phenomenal but it has come at the price of explosive consumption in bandwidth, forcing HSPA operators to either offload as much traffic as possible through wi-fi access points, halt the number of new HSPA dongle customers or capping the maximum downloadable gigabytes per month per user," he added.
The telecom industry sees and promotes LTE as the all-IP migration path for UMTS and EV-DO operators to prepare them for IMT-2000 Advanced or 4G.
The research firm believes few 3G operators will pioneer investment in LTE. These are- DoCoMo, KDDI, eMobile, Hong Kong CSL, PCCW/HGC's joint venture, Telecom New Zealand and China Mobile Hong Kong.
More focus on broadband households
Rojas said currently all the attention is focused on developed APEJ markets, where converged handsets with HSPA and wi-fi are becoming the new dominant end-user mobile device.
However, LTE infrastructure should not be the only agenda and operators in this region should also address the demand of under-served broadband households.
According to IDC, Philippines and other similar markets offer a huge opportunity for the operators because the realistic addressable market could be as high or even higher than one-third of all households. The research firm also notes the situation in India. The officials say that broadband household penetration will be less than 1.6 per cent while its mobile penetration will hit 38 per cent or 439 million subscribers by year-end.
Rojas stresses the need for APEJ markets to move to an all-IP 4G infrastructure. But IDC is not sure about the best paths for GSM operators that do not have 3G spectrum today.
"Do these 2G operators skip 3G altogether and focus on building the scalable fibre backhaul for 4G LTE or IMT-2000 Advanced, adopting IMS technology, and upgrading the OSS/BSS systems to prepare for the proliferation of streaming video and audio content?" asked Rojas.
Both WiMAX and LTE will play an important role in APEJ and they can address a different segment of the market on different spectrum bands. This approach can lead to profits in the coming months.
"LTE and other OFDM systems such as 802.16m have a very important role to play across all parts of APEJ, and all eyes will be on the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) technology choices for IMT-2000 Advanced. It is too early to predict what the ITU will decide but one thing remains fairly certain and that is that OFDMA systems such as LTE will be the workhorse of mobile broadband in the next decade," said Rojas.
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