MediaG3 (MDGC)

[Fishing at Surfside]

Smartphone sales are exploding, which poses long-term questions about wireless network capacity as users show a willingness to pay for ever-bigger data plans.

The pace of smartphone shipments is "extraordinary," jumping by 50 per cent in the second quarter of 2010 over the same quarter in 2009, ABI Research said on Tuesday.

"We're seeing ridiculous growth in smartphones," said ABI analyst Michael Morgan in an interview.

ABI calculated that smartphones made up 19 per cent of all wireless phones that shipped to carriers in the second quarter of this year. Morgan said ABI estimates that smartphones will account for 40 per cent of all wireless phones shipped by 2016, he said.

According to ABI, 61.8 million smartphones, such as the iPhone 4 and the HTC Droid Incredible running the Android OS, shipped in the second quarter. About 321.2 million cell phones of all types shipped in the quarter, Morgan said.

In the second quarter of 2009, ABI said that manufacturers shipped 269.1 million cell phones, including 41.4 million smartphones. The smartphone shipments were 50 per cent higher than the year-earlier quarter and 12 per cent higher than the first quarter of 2010, Morgan added.

Morgan predicted smartphone growth will continue to surge to about 77 million-plus in the current third quarter, or 23 per cent higher than the previous period.

ABI did say it wonders how long such smartphone growth can last, especially with widely reported network capacity problems that the researcher says is "sucking the value out" of the mobile market.

LTE, a 4G wireless technology that uses wireless spectrum more efficiently, should arrive in the U.S. on Verizon Wireless networks later this year and on AT&T's in 2011, Morgan noted. Metro PCS has already launched LTE in three markets and Wimax 4G is in the process of being deployed by Sprint Nextel and Clearwire in U.S. 55 markets.

Tiered pricing plans for heavy data users with smartphones have emerged in the last six months in the U.S., limiting the "all-you-can-eat" users, but ultimately raising further questions about supply and demand for data capacity, Morgan added. "Smartphones are hitting the networks and pulling more data and doing more than ever before," Morgan said.

Morgan also noted that carriers in the U.S. are selling more smartphones than their networks can support. "When it comes to carriers, the decisions are coming from the marketing and business folks who do the advertising and sales to customers, so all they care about is loading the cart and forgetting the horse," he said.

The horse in Morgan's metaphor is the network, managed by the carriers' network engineers "who are viewed as a cost center and are not driving the high-level decision-making." He said carriers are trying to get as many customers on data plans as they can and "putting in as little as possible toward network improvements," even with many billions of dollars being spent on network growth a year.

"Unfortunately, this smartphone growth is so fast that the carriers need to worry about the horse, especially in the U.S.," Morgan said.

http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/365756/smartphone_shipments_explode_raising_capacity_questions/