New figures from ABI Research show that shipments of SIM cards fell by 193 million to 4.94 billion units in 2013, which is a year-on-year decline of 3.8%.
The main factor blamed for this drop was the mobile telecom market in Asia, where SIM card shipments fell below 2011 levels with a 10% decrease.
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Podcast - 15th January 2014
This week's podcast starts with talk about money, as Google buys smart thermostat company Nest Labs while O2 UK closes its mobile Wallet product.
We're also looking at the decline of SMS text messaging in the UK, the end of the Cash4phones recycling business, an alleged security breach that wasn't what it seemed, mobile service on the Channel tunnel and the growth of 4G.
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Operator revenue from mobile data roaming is expected to reach $42 billion (£25.5 billion) by 2018, according to a new report from Juniper Research. That means data will generate 47% of all mobile roaming revenue, compared to an estimated 36% last year.
This increase will be driven by increasing data usage, helped by customers moving to 4G and enjoying faster connections.
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Strategy Analytics says its recent reports predict that LTE (4G) will account for 50% of all mobile connections in the USA by end of 2014.
That’s expected to increase to 79% by the end of 2018.
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EE has added a million new 4G customers to ‘4GEE’ tariffs on its UK network in just four months, doubling the first million it acquired within 10 months of launching the service.
That’s twice its target for 2013, giving EE the fastest 4G sign-up rate in the world outside of South Korea, according to the company’s calculations.
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