500m 3G and 3.5G subs this year

There will be half a billion UMTS/HSPA subscriptions globally by the end of this year, says Informa.

By 2012, it forecasts that the 3G wireless market will include 1.7 billion subscriptions, of which 1.3 billion will be UMTS/HSPA (a 78 per cent share of market).

As of now, GSM continues to dominate the world’s networks. GSM/UMTS gained over 622 million subscriptions in 2007, bringing the total number of subscriptions to more than 2.9 billion worldwide and capturing 87 per cent of the global mobile wireless market.

There are more than 700 GSM operators in service across 220 countries. This includes over 265 EDGE deployments and 211 UMTS commercial networks. The number of HSDPA networks worldwide has nearly doubled from last year, with 182 networks commercial.