BUENOS AIRES, Argentina-After the controversy unleashed in Argentina between Qualcomm and 3G Americas over which technology will prevail in Latin America, Pyramid Research has modified its forecast, lowering by 25 percent its previous estimation of GSM penetration in the market in 2007 and increasing by 40 percent its previous estimation regarding mobile users who will have TDMA service. Due to this, according to a study carried out by Carlos Rodriguez and Daniel Torras, in 2007, 36 percent of Latin American clients will use GSM, 31 percent CDMA, 28 percent TDMA, 3 percent iDEN and 2 percent analog technologies.
“We are more conservative regarding the speed at which TDMA operators will migrate to GSM or CDMA,” said the Pyramid Research analysts. “In addition to being widely available, TDMA handsets continue to be the most inexpensive in the market. This trend will continue as U.S. operators AT&T Wireless and Cingular progress with their migration plans to GSM and retire TDMA handsets from the U.S. market and have them refurbished and shipped to Latin America.”
According to Pyramid Research, during 2001, TDMA was the most used technology by cell-phone customers in Latin America (48 percent) followed by analog users (24 percent), CDMA (22 percent), GSM (4 percent) and iDEN (2 percent). Meanwhile, according to data from the EMC World Cellular Database in June 2002, 60 percent of cell-phone clients used TDMA, 22 percent used CDMA, 13 percent were analog users and 5 percent used GSM services.
