Predicting the Number of Mobile Subscribers: An Accurate Forecasting System and its Application

The Number of Mobile Subscribers (NMS) is an important figure for planning and operating cellular networks. In this paper, we systematically describe how to model and to predict this quantity for the upcoming years and how to study the underlying effects. Besides demonstrating the high accuracy of our method for the United States, China, and Germany, we observe interesting differences when comparing the NMS history and NMS trends of saturated and emerging markets. We conclude that the factors population, Gross Domestic Product (GDP), and urbanization are key differentiators between the studied markets and that our method is useful for further economic studies.