Increased broadband connections in Asia Pacific will generate $1.2 trillion of GDP growth and create up to 35 million new jobs by 2020, said telecom industry body GSMA.
Earlier, GSMA predicted a global shortfall of mobile spectrum of between 600 to 800MHz.
The latest GSMA report developed by Analysys Mason with support from Huawei said the growth in mobile data subscribers in China, using 3G and 4G networks, will result in almost 15,000 petabytes of data per year on China’s mobile networks by 2019.
China mobile networks’ data will be 25 percent of total traffic forecasted for the entire Asia Pacific region and a compound annual growth rate of more than 55 percent between now and 2019.
This apart, a 10 percentage point increase in broadband connections leads to between 0.26 and 0.92 percent increase in GDP and that for every extra 1,000 broadband connections, 33 new jobs are created.
There will be 3 billion mobile broadband – 3G and 4G – connections in the Asia Pacific region by 2020, consuming over 50,000 petabytes of data per year.
Operators in the region will need to use spectrum in multiple bands (typically aggregating 5X20MHz carriers) to maintain the region’s leadership in 4G.
To enable future growth, networks will need to accommodate different traffic loads and cater for the connection of many more types of devices.
Refarming of 2G spectrum for 3G use has resulted in the adoption of UMTS900 handsets in Asia Pacific. One example is the refarming of 900MHz spectrum in Hutchison’s network in Hong Kong, using Huawei’s single radio access network (RAN) infrastructure to provide UMTS900.
Refarming and a range of other options are available to telecom regulators and policy makers for the effective use of spectrum.
editor@telecomlead.com