According to a new research from the GSMA and The Boston Consulting Group, Asia Pacific is on the cusp of a significant opportunity to unlock $1 trillion in GDP growth by 2020 through the harmonized adoption of the 700MHz spectrum band for mobile services. As part of this economic growth, there is the potential to create 2.7 million new jobs, support 1.4 million new businesses and increase government revenues by $171 billion.
The plan, which was implemented in September 2010 by the Asia Pacific Telecommunity (APT), is already approved or will be approved by a number of countries across the region, including Australia, India, Japan, New Zealand and Thailand, with Japan and Papua New Guinea recently awarding licenses. Moreover, at the 2012 World Radiocommunications Conference (WRC-12) in Geneva, telecoms regulators in other regions like Africa, Latin America and the Middle East, have expressed an interest in the APT band plan.
In order to benefit from this opportunity, GSMA says there should be no delays in spectrum allocation and deployment. Even a delay of one year, from 2014 to 2015, could result in a loss of more than $40 billion of incremental GDP growth across the region, and a delay of two years from 2014 to 2016 could result in a loss of $138 billion in GDP growth. What’s more, a one-year or two-year delay could also result in up to 500,000 or 900,000 fewer jobs being created respectively.
According to the study, non-compliant countries would experience 5% less economic gain, 30% less job growth, 30% less new business and 18% less government revenue; while countries neighboring non-compliant countries would also lose up to 3% of GDP growth, up to 10% of job creation, up to 11% of new business growth and up to 12% government revenue…
You can get the whole report from here.