The number of smartphones with Category 9 or Category 10 LTE modems, which enable mobile broadband speeds in the downlink of up to 450 Mbps, will reach 64 million in 2019, said ABI Research.
These devices are not expected to be widely available in the marketplace before the end of 2016. Korean and Chinese operators are likely to be the first to launch 3DL LTE CA networks enabling up to 450 Mbps.
Last week wireless chip major Qualcomm unveiled its Gobi 9×45, the first mobile modem to support these speeds. However, enabled smartphones are unlikely to hit the market before 3Q 2015 at the earliest.
Last November, Qualcomm unveiled its Gobi 9×35 chip, a Category 6 modem with download speeds of up to 300 Mbps. “To date, this chip has only been embedded to selected versions of some commercially available smartphones targeted at the Korean market,” said Malik Saadi, a practice director at ABI Research.
Category 10 modems are targeted at devices supporting at least 3 downlink (3DL) LTE Carrier Aggregation (CA) of up to 3×20 MHz 3GPP-approved channel combinations across various LTE bands and modes.
The number of 3GPP work items dedicated to various 3DL inter-band and intra-band LTE combinations has reached 57 in Q2 2014, 34 of which are targeted at the North American market.
Due to the nature of spectrum licensing in the United States, often based on 10 MHz bandwidth chunks, 3DL LTE CA networks will be largely supported by Category 6 devices in the coming 3 years.
North American consumers are unlikely to enjoy broadband speeds exceeding 300 Mbps in the near future. This is because there are no incentives for telecom operators to deploy devices with Category 10 modems unless they are offered at a similar price of those supporting Category 6.
Since LTE 4G penetration is below 14 percent in Europe, telecom operators are focused on migrating subscribers to LTE rather than upgrading their networks to LTE-Advanced at a large scale.
Korean and Chinese operators are likely to be the first to launch 3DL LTE CA networks enabling up to 450 Mbps. In the last 6 months, Chinese operators sponsored six new 3GPP work items targeted at 3DL LTE CA, the majority of which will support TDD-FDD inter-mode LTE CA.
Image: illustrative purpose
