Nov. 27, 2000

The current booming demand for mobile telephony has no parallel in modern industrial history and the wireless Internet will boost further growth, said Kurt Hellstrom, president of Ericsson AB during a speech to the 16th Chinese-Swedish Joint Business Council Meeting this week in Taipei.

"At the moment, the daily growth in mobile subscribers is 700,000" Hellstrom said. "I don't think we have ever seen anything comparable to this in any other industry".

Part of the boom is the highly anticipated third generation (3G) network which had enjoyed media attention for the over US$ 1 billion companies have paid for licenses to operate a wires broadband network. Hellstrom said that convenience and freedom are major reasons for its advance popularity.

With data connection rates reaching 2Mb/s, 3G communications will allow wireless broadband access. " In only three years, we estimate that more people will access the Internet using a mobile device than a fixed device", he predicted. "Mobile phones have now become the world's best-selling electronic item, being sold in larger quantities than PCs".

But access to the Internet through mobile phones is not limited to 3G, as Japan has already 17 million mobile Internet users, most of them using NTT's highly touted i-mode service.
U.S. customers use AT&T's PocketNet, and other countries, like Taiwan, WAP phones.

"The mobile Internet will develop even faster than the fixed Internet. We believe that the mobile phone will the device that bridges the gap between telecom and the Internet", said Hellstrom. "When you talk about mobile Internet, we are not talking about the future, it is happening right now".

All of this is good news to Ericsson, not just as a mobile phone manufacturer but as a company offering complete end-to-end solutions. While many IT companies such as Dell Computer and Intel have been decreasing growth predictions for 2000, the mobile phone market has grown 4% faster than Ericsson had expected.

Ericsson is the world's largest supplier of mobile infrastructure and has all ten of the biggest mobile operators as customers. With over 640 million global mobile subscribers, Hellstgrom predicted that by the end of 2001 more people will be connected wirelessly that by fixed lines.

As for the future, Ericsson has already begun to start research for a 4th generation concept, after having worked on 3G developments for more than a decade. "4G will be a gradual development of 3G. We expect the first 4G systems to be implemented around 2010.", he said.