LTE subscribers due to hit 1b by 2017

Dylan Bushell-Embling
18 May 2012
00:00

The world's LTE subscriber base is grow ninefold to 90 million by the end of the year, and surpass 1 billion by 2017, research shows.

Strategy Analytics predicts that LTE will account for 15% of all mobile connections and generate over a third of wireless service revenues by 2017.

At the projected rate of growth, the technology is easily exceeding its predecessors by speed of adoption. GSM took 12 years to reach one billion connections, and W-CDMA is expected to take nearly 11 years, while LTE is due to do it in seven.

But Strategy Analytics director of wireless operator strategies Phil Kendall noted that the strong adoption of earlier-generation wireless services is helping stimulate LTE's rapid rise.

“W-CDMA launched into a world of fewer than 1 billion mobile connections, whereas we have over 6 billion connections today,” he said.

Another key contributor to the growth is the fact that LTE smartphones are starting to gain traction outside of their core early markets – Japan, South Korea and the US.

Operators are meanwhile increasingly motivated to roll out LTE to reduce cost per GB of data served, in order to compensate for declining revenues per GB.

“It has taken some time to warm up, but operator sentiment toward LTE has improved significantly over the last year,” Kendall said.

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