Mobile phones are the consumer electronics success story of recent times. The latest subscriber figures for the UK alone show that market penetration is now a staggering 52%; in contrast, countries such as Finland boast figures better than 70%. You might think that service providers would be happy to sit back and enjoy the profits from relatively expensive tariffs, but this clearly isn't the case. Figures from the universal mobile telecommunications system group, UMTS Forum, predict that mobile telephone users worldwide will increase from 426 million today to 1.73 billion by 2010 (Reference 1). Despite immature standards, service providers are developing and planning deployment of technologies that will help them recoup such massive investments.
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