erall penetration of mobile services in the region begins to reach its limits or that the market share between operators starts to stabilize. Thus, for all practical pur- poses, in particular for the network dimensioning exercise in this field study, we con- sider primarily the data from 2002 to 2005 from Table 7.2. 7 The forecast has harmonized numbers, which do not apply to any operator or service provider in particular. Deploying 3G Networks PROJECTING CAPACITY NEEDS Based on the preceding section dimensioning in this field study would then begin for about 1.5 million subscribers all using either voice only or multimedia services. The proportion will depend on the business strategy and the type of service products offered. Business strategy will have a strong relationship with the market segment addressed and the penetration of the type of services proposed. If we take Switzerland, for example, penetration of mobile services will reach 60% in all segments by the time we complete this writing. Clearly, voice appears as the predominant service, although data through SMS and HSCSD and early GPRS may grow. This means that the market for multime- dia services remains quite open even up to 100%. Thus, following a pragmatic ap- proach, network dimensioning and capacity projections will imperatively be done for multimedia services addressing all segments. Now for all practical purposes we identify three main segments, i.e. business, residen- tial, and mass market (see Chapter 6). The traffic distribution among these segments will depend on the subscriber demand, operator's service offer, and qualitative think- ing. Nevertheless, looking at the data in Table 7.1 and Table 7.2, about 70% of the mar- ket stands open for multimedia type services. If we distribute the latter as 40% mass market and 15% business and residential, respectively; then dimensioning should follow conventional wisdom. Conventional wisdom may tell us that residential and business segments will tend to use larger transmission rates (e.g. 384 kbps) in