Over the past five years, wholesale international Internet service providers have experienced demand increases that are virtually unprecedented in other industries. At the same time, equally stunning price declines eroded much of the benefit of this traffic growth. According to the latest research in TeleGeography’s Global Internet Geography 2007, these trends continued through the 12 months from Q2 2005 to Q2 2006, but with a significant twist: International IP traffic growth actually accelerated over the past 12 months, while the pace of price erosion abated noticeably in many of the world’s most competitive markets.

“However, carriers should not become too optimistic.” states Eric Schoonover, Senior Research Analyst with TeleGeography, adding “At the moment, nearly all markets have growth rates that more than compensate for the steady decline in wholesale prices, providing opportunities for carriers to increase return on investment. This is particularly true in high growth markets, including Latin America and Asia.” For example; in Buenos Aires, the average price for STM-1 access to Internet networks (known as “IP Transit”) fell only 11 percent to $187 per Mbps in 2006; at the same time, average Internet traffic from Buenos Aires increased by 119 percent.

The following graph highlights the comparison of price declines versus traffic growth for select cities worldwide:

For carriers, investors, and hardware/software vendors, such trends are a welcome change of pace from earlier years, when demand could barely keep up with price declines. However, TeleGeography’s data also strike a cautionary note. Residential broadband markets, one of the chief drivers of Internet traffic, are already becoming saturated.

As markets continue to evolve, an authoritative source is needed to help make mission critical decisions. Built on years of research and data, TeleGeography’s team of experts, and the cooperation of hundreds of ISPs worldwide, Global Internet Geography 2007 combines the latest international IP bandwidth, pricing, and traffic data sets with concise analysis on network growth and competition worldwide. The result is an essential tool for carriers, hardware/software vendors, and industry analysts seeking real data and objective insights on market opportunities and other competitive challenges.

To learn more about Global Internet Geography 2007, please visit our web site or contact your account manager:

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TeleGeography has identified the ten worldwide wireless operators that lost the most market share in the twelve months ending 30 March 2006. The data analysed is derived from information gathered daily and stored in GlobalComms, TeleGeography’s regularly updated online encyclopedia of wireline and wireless telecommunications operators.

Amongst those to lose significant market share is BCTI, an operator based in the Central Asian country of Turkmenistan, ranked by TeleGeography as the top ‘loser’ with a 19.4% drop in market share to 78.3%. Backed by the mighty Russian operator MTS, BCTI has lost ground through a combination of regulatory wranglings (its license was actually revoked for a few weeks in 2005 meaning no new customers could join) and stiffer competition from its rival state-owned rival TM-Cell (known locally as Altyn Asyr).

The second placed loser was TeliaSonera Finland, which saw its share of the market fall from 57.4% in 1Q 2005 to 46.6% in the same quarter of 2006, as a result of rival Elisa Mobile buying MVNO Saunalahti and porting its 500,000-strong user base to its own network. Over the same period, Indosat, via its wholly owned wireless arm Satelindo, saw its market share drop from 32% to 26.4%, which the company attributes to the process of compulsory registration of pre-paid users and its own conscious decision to market its services less aggressively to the low-end segment; in the three months ending March 2006 Satelindo actually recorded a 1.55 million decrease in subscribers, while ARPU fell 24.4% year-on-year to just INR58,836 (USD6.1) per month.

Brasilcel (operating under the brand Vivo) has been steadily losing market share for the last year, a fact it attributes to its operation of a CDMA-based network rather than the more popular GSM. So convinced is Vivo that this is the underlying reason behind its decline, that in June this year it announced plans to overlay its network with GSM infrastructure in an exercise which could cost an estimated USD2.51 billion.

While the list of losers depicts operators dealing with a myriad of issues ranging from regulatory debates to the perception of network inferiority, the poor performance of UMC in Ukraine can be attributed to a common problem: strong competition. Its defeat can be laid firmly at the feet of rival Astelit, the Turkcell/TeliaSonera backed operator, whose subscribers rose from just 134,000 in March 2005 to a massive 3.2 million a year later, impacting the market shares of all other cellcos.

No other telecom market research tool rivals the geographic scope and depth of coverage found in GlobalComms. This continuously updated analysis of more than 150 countries and 1,000+ companies provides essential operator statistics such as subscribers, revenue, EBITDA, CAPEX, ARPU, and more. And it not only covers the wireless segment; the fixed line and broadband markets are given the same exhaustive profiling.

To learn more about GlobalComms, please visit our web site or contact your account manager:

http://www.telegeography.com/products/global_comms/index.php