An Ovum report in the United States has shown that the proliferation of mobile wireless technology and services in the US, particularly wireless broadband, is having a massive impact on the productivity of the entire economy with significant benefits flowing to small businesses and health care from the use of wireless broadband.

The report was commissioned by the CTIA.

AMTA Chief Executive Officer, Chris Althaus, said the report for the CTIA confirmed the findings of a recent report for AMTA by Access Economics. It found the economic benefits created by the mobile telecommunications industry in Australia were far greater than the resources it draws from the economy.

“The mobile telecommunications industry is an important contributor to Australia’s economic growth because its indirect contribution outweighs its direct contribution,” jit said. “This contrasts with many other industries for which the major component of economic contribution derives from the industry’s own usage of economic resources. In this regard the mobile phone industry is shown to be punching above its weight.”

Some of the major findings of the Ovum report of the impact of wireless broadband on the US economy are

• In 2004, mobile voice services generated productivity gains to the U.S. economy worth $157 billion per year.

• In 2005, mobile wireless broadband services generated productivity gains to the U.S. economy worth $28 billion per year.

• In 2005, the productivity value of all mobile wireless services was worth $185 billion, greater than the total value of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry (according to BizStats.com).

• Between 2004 and 2005, the productivity enhancements generated by the use of mobile wireless broadband tripled in value.

• In 2005, 68.8 million US enterprise users had mobile wireless services, with only a quarter using mobile wireless broadband. By 2016, the US is projected to have 81.9 million mobile enterprise users, with 83 percent using wireless broadband.

• Health care and small businesses are the big winners. In 2005, productivity improvements due to use of mobile broadband solutions across the U.S. health care industry were worth almost $6.9 billion. By 2016, that number will triple to $27.2 billion, or twice the size (according to Bizstats.com) of the current vocational rehabilitation sector of the health care industry. As demonstrated in several case studies provided in this Report, small businesses are uniquely empowered by implementation and use of wireless broadband technologies and applications.

• To put this information into context, consider that by 2016, the value of the combined mobile wireless voice and broadband productivity gains to the US economy $427 billion per year will exceed today’s motor vehicle manufacturing and pharmaceutical industries combined.

Mr Althaus said both reports – Access and Ovum – showed the growing impact of mobile enabling broadband on the economic productivity of both economies.

“This underscores the necessity for a consistent and integrated set of policies and regulations that will support the rapid uptake of mobile broadband.”

“The Ovum report points out that the internet and computers have up until now been credited with improving productivity growth. We are now seeing the vital role played by wireless telecommunications in driving productivity flow-on across the entire economy,” he said.

“It is estimated in the Australian context that the indirect benefits from mobile voice and data, as measured by the impacts on GDP, are estimated to rise to $8.1 billion in 2008 and $9.3 billion in 2010.

“By 2010, it is estimated that the increased uptake of 3G and the consequent increase in mobile data traffic will contribute $2.1 billion towards this figure, in additional GDP over and above the gains of mobile voice.

A critical part of Australia’s ability to harness the potential of mobile broadband and data services is the availability of spectrum to provide the bandwidth needed to support services provision and customer demand.

“AMTA has highlighted the vital importance of additional spectrum resources and the increasingly significant role of mobile data services on economic activity across all sectors of the economy to the Australian Communications and Media Authority as part of the comments on the future Australian spectrum outlook 2009-14.

Globally the trend is forecast to see mobile broadband account for approximately half of broadband traffic by 2010 and twos thirds by 2012.