MONTREAL – The worldwide LTE subscriber base nearly doubled in size over the previous quarter to reach 12.02 million subscribers by the end of 2011, according to new research from Maravedis.
In its 17th issue of the 4GCounts Quarterly Report, the Montreal-based research firm said that the quarter-over-quarter subscriber increase for LTE and WiMAX was 92% and 14%, respectively, over that reported at the end of the third quarter of 2011.
By the end of last year, 54 operators worldwide had launched LTE commercially, 19 during the fourth quarter alone. An additional 224 major mobile operators had committed to launching the technology in the future, 193 of those with FDD-LTE and 31 with TD-LTE. Most TD-LTE trials have been taking place in the Asia-Pacific region with 18 operators trialing the technology, followed by Europe with 5 trials in the fourth quarter of 2011.
Other findings include:
– 2.6GHz, in combination with 800 MHz and 1800 MHz, will be the dominant bands for LTE deployments in the future;
– Large volume production of TD-LTE handsets will not start until 2013;
– BWA/WiMAX subscriber base will slowly reach 35 million at the end of 2016;
– By 2016, smart phones and tablets will dominate the 4G device market, accounting for 55% and 15% of the total 4G device market share respectively; and
– The top 50 LTE operators reported a total installed base of 59,000 base station sectors at the end of Q4 2011, up from 37,000 base station sectors installed at the end of Q3 2011.
