Since 2007, the emerging markets of the world, especially India and China, have driven overall GSM market growth, despite continual GSM market declines in developed regions of the world that have been transitioning to 3G, according to the Dell’Oro Group.
Operators in emerging regions have been deploying significant amounts of GSM infrastructure to support their immense subscriber growth. In 2009, while China Unicom and China Mobile will begin to focus the majority of their capital expenditures on 3G networks, each operator is still expected to spend billions of dollars on expanding its GSM footprint.
In addition, in order to support record-setting growth of GSM subscribers in India, operators such as BSNL, Bharti, Aircel and Datacom have plans to spend billions of dollars on expanding their networks in 2009 as well.
