Cosmote 5G Ready as Greece Prepares for Spectrum Auctions

Along with being the largest of the Greek mobile operators, Cosmote provides an impressive coverage of all different generations of the networks; 2G, 3G, 4G (LTE), 4G+ (LTE-Advanced) and 4G++ (LTE-A Pro).

While up to date numbers of different mobile operators in Greece is not easily available, it is estimated to have roughly over 8 million subscribers.

Back in December 2018, Cosmote did some 5G demos with Ericsson. A summary of the demo is available in this presentation and embedded in the video below.


Some more information on what 5G would mean for Comote subscribers is available on their website here.

According to Telegeography:

Greece’s telecoms regulator, the Hellenic Telecommunications & Post Commission (Ethniki Epitropi Tilepikoinonion kai Tachydromeion, EETT), has taken a significant step towards its planned auction of 5G mobile spectrum. It has called for applications for a tender to find a contractor to help manage the award process, with bids for the EUR160,000 (USD181,000) contract invited until 12 July.

The watchdog is looking to award 2×30MHz in the 700MHz band, 65MHz in the 1500MHz range, 2×15 plus 2×45MHz in the 2100MHz band, 280MHz at 3.6GHz and 2,500MHz in the 24GHz-28GHz range. While some frequencies will be sold via auction, others will be offered for free.

Malaysia Mobile Operator Overview

As of March 2011, the penetration rate in Malaysia was estimated at 117.635% over a population estimate of around 29 million.

Source.

Malaysia has 12 MVNOs and counting. Source.

In Malaysia, an interesting trend observed is that smaller mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs)  have been steadily eroding prepaid market share from the Big Three cellular providers Maxis Bhd (Maxis),  Celcom Axiata Bhd (Celcom) and DiGi.Com Bhd (DiGi).

Malaysia’s rate of 140 per cent exceeds that of developed markets such as South Korea with 111 per cent and Taiwan’s rate of 127 per cent, and is among the highest in Asia.

In fact, it pointed out that Malaysia is closing fast on the gap with Hong Kong (230 per cent), Singapore (152 per cent) and Vietnam (149 per cent), the only three countries which have higher mobile penetration.
Source 

AT&T and Verizon are now tied for the rank of largest U.S. mobile carrier

Who leads the U.S. in mobile subscribers? According to mobile analyst Chetan Sharma, it’s now a neck-and-neck race between AT&T and Verizon who collectively controls 68 percent of the market.

At the end of March, AT&T had 116 million total connections, but that number includes all of its wholesale subscribers (those that connect with one of AT&T’s mobile virtual network operator partners) and machine-to-machine links attached to cars, gadgets and other devices in the internet of things. Verizon doesn’t report any of those numbers. It only reveals business and consumer retail subscribers buying their service directly from Verizon. That number totaled 103 million.

If you only factored in AT&T’s retail prepaid and postpaid customers you would get 85.1 million, but AT&T has a substantially larger wholesale business Verizon. So by Sharma’s calculations just as many people are connecting their phones and tablets and hotspots to AT&T’s network as Verizon.

Any way you look at it, these two carriers are huge. They collected control 68 percent of the U.S. wireless market. It’s also interesting to note that if Sprint were to merge with T-Mobile – as Sprint’s new chairman Masayoshi Son is so keen on doing– the two would hold a combined 30 percent of the U.S. mobile market.

That’s still smaller than either Big Red or Ma Bell, but definitely qualifies as a mega-carrier. And it doesn’t leave much room for the other guys. The 125 or so regional and rural carriers in the U.S. accounted for a meager 2 percent of all mobile subscriptions.

Source

Market share: Mobile operators UK 2013

http://www.statista.com/statistics/279993/market-share-of-mobile-phone-operators-in-the-united-kingdom-uk/