Bruce,
<< Rubbish the biggest cities sao-paulo/rio/salvador/porto-allegre/belo
by far highest percentage of digital users are cdma/analog on 800mhz >>
Could be "Rubbish" but ...
Just like here in the US:
CDMA/analog subscribers are counted as cdma.
TDMA/analog subscribers are counted as tdma.
AMPS only customers are counted as analog.
The fact remains that the majority of digital subscribers in Brazil are TDMA.
Close as I can tell from the Strategis bar charts the numbers break out to be about:
* 5 million analog (38,5%)
* 2 million CDMA (15.4%)
* 6 million TDMA (46.1%)
* 13 million total
These numbers match up pretty closely with the projection made 15 months ago in "CDG Spectrum" which offers an explanation of why CDMA lags TDMA in Brazil:
>> Latin America: The New Land Of Opportunity?
cdg.org
The biggest challenge for companies selling CDMA equipment in the region isn't proving the quality of their product-laboratory tests tend to favor CDMA over TDMA in terms of voice quality and line capacity. Rather, it's taking on the region's biggest equipment supplier, Ericsson, which favors the use of TDMA equipment. "TDMA, because of Ericsson and because it had a head start, is still the dominant standard in Latin America," says Leslie Arathoon, a Latin America telecoms analyst at Boston-based Pyramid Research, a unit of the Economist Intelligence Unit. "But CDMA is now playing catch-up, and it's gaining ground." Pyramid sees CDMA's share of PCS and mobile business reaching 15 percent by the end of this year, and 35 percent within four years compared to TDMA's projected 58 percent share at that time. <<
BTW: CDG reports CDMA subscribers for all Latin America through March 2000 as 6,520,000.
Now the really good news is that GSMA reports less than 1 million subs in total in all of Latin America through May. Now that is catch up, particularly if you consider that 1800 MHz auctions in Brazil won't conclude till end of year.
If you have an alternative source for subscriber statistics for Brazil, I would appreciate seeing it.
- Eric - |
