Wireless 3G connections live on with 12 percent growth

ABI Research projected growth in the SIM card market for 2015, showing 3G and 4G SIM shipments will see 12 and 109 percent growth, respectively. It’s no surprise that 4G SIM shipments are seeing rapid growth, as LTE connections are expected to eventually replace older 3G and 2G technologies. However, the SIM market shows that 3G is not dead yet. Older technologies remain critical to connecting many mobile devices around the world. Part of the reason is that LTE infrastructure is not yet as widespread as it needs to be to phase out older technology. Even so, 2G SIM shipments are expected to decline 14 percent this year.

Another area of the market seeing declining growth is NFC-equipped SIM cards, which are expected to increase 21 percent in 2015. This is much slower than the 120 percent growth of 2014. “This year’s NFC SIM decline constitutes bad news for mobile network operators but good news for device manufacturers pushing to directly implant the embedded secure element into their devices,” ABI research analyst Dimitrios Pavlakis said. NFC has been a standard feature in high-end Android phones at least since 2011, when Google launched Android Wallet. In 2014, though, Apple launched Apple Pay, and many more retailers and banks started supporting officially mobile payments via NFC. This was a boon for the technology as people without NFC-equipped smartphones turned to NFC SIM cards. Embedded NFC chips are expected to become more popular, so the NFC SIM market might see growth end soon. Meanwhile, smartphones in developed markets mostly require NFC or they risk being outdated from the minute they go on sale. This was a critical point made in just about every review of the OnePlus 2, which left out the technology to save on costs.

Most Chins manufacturers have not been blind to the trends. NFC smartphones have been proliferating quickly, as have 4G smartphones. Listings for 4G phones and 3G phones on Global Sources were roughly the same in November, but 4G phones got about 3 times as many product inquiries. There is no denying that 4G is the future, but it’s not quite yet time to count out 3G.