A new report conducted by Informa Telecoms and Media has shown that the global wireless industry has now passed the 4 billion milestone which shows that now there are 4 billion mobile phone accounts active around the world.

Informa’s regional director for the Americas, Marisol Gomez, claimed, “The Latin America and Caribbean region continues to show steady consumer growth with 16% year-on-year growth as subscription numbers are expected to reach in excess of 440 million, equating to 76% penetration.� The market in the region to have shown the greatest number of net additions in the year was unsurprisingly Brazil [19 million], but in terms of annual growth, we note that Peru has been a particularly fast growing market with 4.6 million net additions, representing annual subscription growth of 33%.”

The many telecoms providers around the world in developed countries have been discovering improved methods of providing internet connections to mobile handsets and many providers have recently announced plans to migrate their networks to LTE (the next generation of mobile broadband technology) from 2010 onwards.

The President of 3G Americas, Chris Pearson, said, “Third generation technologies continue to evolve and the GSM operator today has a clear path towards LTE.� In addition to the evolution to LTE by GSM operators, LTE is proving to be the technology choice for CDMA operators as well.” 3G Americas is a GSM aimed trading firm.

Perhaps this is not the greatest news for a group of hippies that have recently made the news in Glastonbury who are claiming that a new wireless network in the area is to blame for a series of health problems felt by the community.

Glastonbury is legendary for its healing properties amongst so-called New Age Hippies, however, there has been outrage since the rise of a £34,000 wireless experimental project.� The problem has been taken up between the hippies and the wireless Internet and the chakras which apparently don’t work well together.

However, studies have often shown that Wi-Fi has no effects on the health of those around the invisible rays, including a physicist at the Imperial College, Dr Eric de Silva, who claims that no studies have detected any issues or connections between Wi-Fi exposure and damaging to health.

Still, the future of wireless Internet still appears to be healthy as we sit back and watch competition bring faster speeds at smaller costs.� Pearson went on to say, “HSPA and HSPA+ will compete with any and all mobile wireless technologies available today and in the near future.� In fact, recent commercial launches of HSPA+, such as that of Telstra in Australia, are reporting peak theoretical downlink speeds of 21.6 Mbps. 3G is more than capable of delivering the bandwidth customers need today, and the emerging LTE technology provides us with a clear evolution path for the future.”

77 per cent of the wireless market share (320 million connections) currently uses UMTS/HSPA networks and the other 95 million users are using CDMA EV-DO.