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This has driven the need for development of new
wireless standard and deployment of various types
of wireless BB connections. Thus, in the new era,
with the increasing speed and stability of mobile
broadband connections, another revolutionary
change is coming in the communications process
which will facilitate access to and transmit of
information from anywhere in the world by using
a variety of exciting new mobile devices
2
.
In last two decades, the use of wireless voice
telephone communications has significantly
increased in developed as well as in developing
countries. Also, in recent years, with the increased
capacity and speeds of wireless transmission and
introduction of many new mobile devices with data
access capability, people are increasing their use
of this technology for their data communication
needs. This change in behavior has created the de-
mand for wireless access connections with higher
bandwidth. Moreover, due to its cost advantage of
deployment, this technology is not only becoming
the communications platform for provisioning
broadband access to homes in the urban areas but
also a viable solution for providing services for
homes in both remote and underserved areas. The
purpose of this chapter is to study this evolving
change in broadband technology and the role the
wireless broadband access technology plays in
this evolution
3
. More specifically, the object is
to study the current trends in wireless broadband
landscape and assess where the technology is
heading as a whole.
Finally the aim of this chapter is to analyze
the observed trend in the application of various
broadband technologies by using historical data
from the US and the rest of the world. For the BB
adoption data, we use functional data analysis
(Ramsay and Silverman, 1997) to estimate the
velocity and acceleration associated with BB
penetration in various countries around the world.
In addition to that, this study formulates a simple
time series model to provide a directional forecast
for the future trend in the deployment and adoption
of fixed as well as mobile broadband technology.
The layout of the chapter is as follows. The
second section introduces the characteristics of
various broadband access technologies and de-
scribes the benefits associated with their adoption.
A brief description of the data is given in section
III. In the subsequent section (IV), country specific
differences in diffusion of fixed as well as mobile
broadband technology are analyzed while taking
into account the underlying dynamics in rate of
growth of adoption. In section V, we study the
trend in growth of fixed and mobile broadband
subscribers and compare that with observed
subscription behavior in landline versus wireless
voice telephone service. Based on historical data
for broadband adoption, we develop a simple
model to predict the future trend in broadband
adoption behavior for selected countries and the
results are presented in section VI. The summary
and conclusions are provided in the final section..
BROADBAND ACCESS
AND ITS BENEFITS
Definition and Characteristics
of Broadband Access
In operational terms, BB refers to a set of elec-
tronic communications technology solutions. The
primary features that distinguishes this technology
from other competitive transmission technologies
include its relatively high bandwidth, always
on functionality
4
and capability for high speed
information transmission in both directions: down-
stream from Internet to the user's computer and
upstream from user's computer to the Internet. An
integrated view of these features, however, does
not suggest a specific speed or a specific service.
In fact there is no universally accepted standard
regarding the speed of transmission that character-
izes BB. Instead a number of speed transmission
standards have been proposed by various organi-
zations around the world. The Recommendation
1.113 of the ITU Standardization Sector (ITU-T)
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