The number of subscribers for mobile communications has increased much faster than predicted, particularly for terrestrial use. In the year 2000 the number of mobile subscribers was higher than 400 million worldwide and for the year 2010 more than 1700 million mobile subscribers are anticipated. The majority of traffic is changing from speech-oriented communications to multimedia communications. It is also generally expected that due to the dominating role of mobile wireless access, the number of portable handsets will exceed the number of PCs connected to the Internet | Broadband Wireless Mobile 3G and Beyond. Edited by Willie W. Lu Copyright 2002 John Wiley Sons Ltd. ISBN 0-471-48661-2 6 Conclusions The number of subscribers for mobile communications has increased much faster than predicted particularly for terrestrial use. In the year 2000 the number of mobile subscribers was higher than 400 million worldwide and for the year 2010 more than 1700 million mobile subscribers are anticipated. The majority of traffic is changing from speech-oriented communications to multimedia communications. It is also generally expected that due to the dominating role of mobile wireless access the number of portable handsets will exceed the number of PCs connected to the Internet. Therefore mobile terminals will be the major person-machine interface in the future instead of the PC. Due to the dominating role of IP-based data traffic in the future the networks and systems have to be designed for economic packet data transfer. The expected new data services are highly bandwidth consuming. This results in higher data rate requirements for future systems. The major step from the second generation to 3Gwireless and Beyond was the ability to support advanced and wideband multimedia services including email file transfers and distribution services like radio TV and software provisioning . software download . These multimedia services can be symmetrical and asymmetrical services real-time and non real-time services. External market studies have predicted that in Europe in the year 2010 more than 90 million mobile subscribers will use mobile multimedia services and will generate about 60 of the traffic in terms of transmitted bits. Only in China the Delson Group predicted that there will be 300 million mobile phones in China by year 2008 and over 100 million for multimedia applications. In 3Gwireless the combination and convergence of the different worlds Information Technology IT industry media industry and telecommunications will integrate .
