The CDMA Development Group (CDG) announced that the CDMA subscriber base has surpassed half a billion users worldwide. At the end of the second quarter of 2009, there were 502 million people using the CDMA family of technologies (including cdmaOne), with 494 million CDMA2000 subscribers and 128 million EV-DO broadband users.
"The CDG is proud to announce that CDMA is now used by over 500 million people," said Perry LaForge, executive director of the CDG. "We congratulate our member companies on their successful efforts in creating a thriving CDMA community. We are particularly pleased to see growth accelerating in a number of areas."
During the second quarter of 2009, Indian CDMA operators celebrated their 100 millionth customer and brought EV-DO Revision A (Rev. A) high-speed wireless data services to market. Meanwhile, China Telecom subscribed 6.44 million new CDMA2000 users, including 1.3 million EV-DO Rev. A customers to its "e-surfing" brand. In Africa, nearly 50 CDMA2000 operators added 2.5 million new users during the quarter and in North America, over 2 million subscribers were added in the same period.
CDMA2000 1xEVDO
CDMA2000 broadband service providers worldwide added over 26.6 million EV-DO users from June 2008 to June 2009, representing a 27 percent increase. CDMA2000 EV-DO is a leading mobile broadband technology, with 167 operators in 63 countries offering always-on CDMA2000 broadband data services to 128 million users. 70 of these operators have deployed CDMA2000 1xEV-DO Rev. A networks to offer advanced mobile broadband services, and another 38 operators are in the process of deploying Rev. A. Operators are currently trialing Multicarrier EV-DO, which extends the value of their existing Rev. A networks through software upgrades that either double an operator's data network capacity or triple a user's peak data rates.
Operators worldwide continued impressive gains with EV-DO, with a wider availability of mobile broadband-enabled devices and the increased usage of smartphones and feature phones. African operators made the biggest gain year-over-year, adding over 3 million EV-DO users at a 500 percent growth rate. North American (U.S. and Canada) operators increased EV-DO subscribers by almost 17 million during the year to reach 71 million, while another 4.8 million were added in Asia Pacific to reach 44 million. EV-DO users in Europe nearly doubled to 1.3 million subscribers, while operators in the Middle East added almost half a million subscribers over the year. Latin America and Caribbean EV-DO subscribers increased by 46 percent to 6.3 million.
CDMA2000
Overall, 22.4 million new CDMA2000 subscribers were added during the second quarter of 2009, representing more than half of the 44.3 million new users between June 2008 and June 2009. Europe, Africa and the Middle East continue to be the most rapidly-growing regions for CDMA2000, adding 13 million subscribers in the past year representing a 59 percent growth rate. The region now accounts for 7 percent of all CDMA2000 subscribers worldwide.
China, India and Indonesia continue to drive CDMA2000's growth in Asia Pacific, which now accounts for 53 percent of the global CDMA2000 market after adding 18.7 million new CDMA2000 subscribers during the 12-month period. North America saw 11.5 million new CDMA2000 users over the year to reach 155.5 million subscribers, with CDMA2000 maintaining its hold of 52 percent market share in the U.S.
More information on CDMA is available at www.cdg.org.