3G Americas, a wireless consortium focused on making sure the western hemisphere catches up to the eastern hemisphere in terms of mobile telecommunications awesomeness sometime before the end of this century, is predicting that in September of this year there will be 4 billion GSM connections live. From June 2008 to June 2009, the amount of people using HSPA, the faster version GSM, in the Americas region grew by 19% compared to 20% globally. When you add UMTS to the mix, also known as 3G, the rate of growth for the same period increases drastically to 57% according to analysts at Informa. Informa also says that it will take until 2012 to reach the first billion UMTS/HSPA customers. You have to feel bad for the guy on some Caribbean island trying to pirate a copy of Windows 7 using only GPRS. By the time that download finishes, it probably will be 2012 and by then Europe will have super cheap LTE. At least I hope. Hopefully the FCC will help speed up America’s evolution.
[Via: Cellular News]