As per Maravedis? 4GCounts quarterly report, quarter over quarter subscriber increase for LTE and Wi-Max was 250 per cent and 12 per cent respectively at the end of October 2011.
At the end of the third quarter of 2011, 35 operators had commercially launched FDD LTE. “LTE adoption is accelerating. Maravedis anticipates that there will be 448 million LTE subscribers by 2016, of which 20 per cent will be TD-LTE users,” said Cintia Garza, 4GCounts team leader.
The region where the most TD-LTE trials have been conducted is APAC with 12 operator’s trials, followed by Europe with nine trials. “Although we have seen some commercial TD-LTE deployments happening in 2011 outside Asia, these deployments will not drive the economies of scale expected from the deployments that will occur in China and India next year, and volume production of TD-LTE handsets will not be realised until the end of 2012. We now expect TD-LTE smartphones will be ready for commercial launch in early 2013,” said Basharat Ashai, co-author of the report.
This quarter, Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN)-Motorola and Huawei had the lion’s share of awarded LTE infrastructure contracts, with 29 per cent and 26 per cent respectively. Huawei, Ericsson, and NSN are among the leading providers of LTE infrastructure for the top 50 LTE operators.
THIS QUARTER’S SUMMARY FINDINGS:
- The majority of the LTE devices available today support the 700MHz band because the predominant LTE deployments are from US operators Verizon Wireless and AT&T.
- By 2016, smartphones, USB dongles and tablets will dominate the 4G device market, accounting for 47 per cent, 20 per cent and 16 per cent of the total 4G device market share respectively.
- 36 per cent of the total Wi-Max devices sold in the last quarter were in the handset/smartphones category
