Gus over at Lifehacker brings us word that analyst firm Telsyte is predicting Australia will have over 35 million active SIM cards by 2015. It’s a good time to hold shares in a mobile telco, apparently.
Currently there are about 29 million active SIM cards sitting in mobile phones, wireless broadband dongles and wireless security products around the country, which is still an insanely high figure. But such concentrated growth over the next three years is going to be amplified with more and more devices offering permanent 3G connection. Let’s just hope that the Telcos manage to keep up with the strain of so many extra devices…
Geekface Killah
Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 4:44 PMDoes this count the SIMs in electricity meters, traffic lights and the sorts?
Nick Broughall
Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 9:00 PMYep, sure does.
Samuel of Kadina
Thursday, December 1, 2011 at 7:46 PMGiven the news that we are also running out of 04xx mobile numbers, do 3G Dongles actually need a phone number attached, or is this part of the legacy billing service that the Telcos use?. I’m sure there are few that use them for SMS, but the majority shouldn’t. If I recall correctly, the old CDMA phones had no need for a SIM Card.
Oliver Herbu
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 3:07 AMI’m pretty sure they do that so they can bundle SMS service along with a 3G dongle. Another way they can extort money from you for sending a couple bytes of data.
Daniel
Friday, December 2, 2011 at 10:54 AMI find it hard to believe we are actually running out of numbers. 35 million SIM cards would indicate 35 million numbers, well short of the 100 million 04xx numbers available. What we will run short of is allocations of prefixes, such as 0421, each containing a million numbers.
Telcos need to get better at recycling numbers that have lapsed instead of putting their hand out for more numbers every time they burn through the new allocations with new activations.