Telecom Lead India: LTE connections will increase
nine-fold in 2012 to reach 90 million, mainly supported by uptake of LTE
smartphones in US, South Korea and Japan, according to Strategy Analytics.
The study also expects that this trend will continue and
the technology will exceed one billion connections by early 2017.
Strategy Analytics predicts that LTE, which has
overwhelming support by global operators as their 4G upgrade path and offers
improved cost efficiency for mobile data services, will account for 15 percent
of all mobile connections in 2017, putting it on a faster trajectory than any
other mobile technologies.
It has taken some time to warm up, but operator
sentiment toward LTE has improved significantly over the last year. The LTE
smartphone market is providing this sudden lift, with LTE’s medium-term potential
boosted by the much greater scale in today’s mobile market: WCDMA launched into
a world of fewer than one billion mobile connections, whereas we have over six
billion connections today,” said Phil Kendall, director of the Strategy
Analytics Wireless Operator Strategies service.
The market research firm said that GSM took 12 years to
reach one billion connections and WCDMA will take nearly 11 years, while LTE
will take just over seven years.
The race is on for mobile operators to reduce cost per
Gigabyte (GB) to match the rate at which revenue per GB is falling. LTE is one
of the key tools to deliver this improvement, with the early volume in LTE
devices an encouraging sign for operators looking to maximize return on their
LTE investments,” said Sue Rudd, director, Service Provider Analysis.
North America leads LTE market with 10.8 million LTE
subscriptions
North America dominates the LTE market with 10.8 million
LTE subscriptions, more than two-thirds of the global subscriber base as of
March 2012.
The U.S. has about 10.5 million LTE connections, while
Canada contributes nearly 300,000 connections as of the first quarter
2012.
