MONTREAL – The worldwide LTE industry recorded a five-time increase in subscribers quarter-over-quarter, according to new research from Maravedis.
In its 4GCounts Quarterly Report, the Montreal-based research firm found that the subscriber increase for LTE and WiMAX was 478% and 14% respectively, from the first quarter of the year through the end of June 2011.
At the end of Q2 2011, there were 177 operators worldwide committed to FDD-LTE, 21 operators committed to TD-LTE, 20 operators that have commercially launched FDD LTE, and four operators that have conducted trials of both TD-LTE and FDD-LTE.
TD-LTE subscribers’ uptake will start in 2013 onwards, based on commercial service from China Mobile and other Asian operators. Regionally, the report assumed that TD-LTE growth will be driven by APAC countries including China, India, Japan, Korea and Malaysia.
Today there are more than 137 LTE device models commercially available. In the second quarter, 28% of the LTE devices models available were USB dongles, 33% were routers, and 20% were modules.
Other findings include:
– At the end of Q2 2011, Huawei and NSN-Motorola had the lion’s share of awarded LTE contracts, with 33% and 30% respectively;
– 87% of the total LTE devices activated worldwide will be multi-mode devices supporting WIMAX and/or Legacy (2G/3G) by 2016; and
– Maravedis predicts the BWA/WiMAX subscriber base will reach approximately 28.6 million at the end of 2012.
