LTE technology looks set to surge in customer acceptance, with Juniper Research forecasting one billion users in 2017, nearly doubling to 1.8 billion users by 2019. The research firm claims that growth will push LTE towards 22% of the global mobile market by the end of the decade.
In its report, “4G LTE: subscribers, smartphones, base stations & service revenue 2014-2019,” Juniper notes “LTE network commitments and roll-outs at an all-time high,” with growing support from network and device vendors. The report cites the latest Global Mobile Suppliers Association numbers that tout 168 device original equipment manufacturers have announced 1,889 LTE devices along with 300 commercial network launches. Juniper Research added that nearly one-third of smartphones shipped this year will include LTE capabilities.
Ericsson recently reported that LTE networks covered approximately 20% of the world’s population at the end of 2013, with that number expected to hit 65% by 2019.
Helping to boost LTE adoption is the growing number of deployments in heavily populated Asian markets, including China, Japan and India. According to Juniper Research, those markets are expected to count a number of TD-LTE networks, which will increase the significance of the unpaired spectrum variation of the LTE standard.
“TD-LTE will play a significant role, especially in the emerging markets, pushed by China Mobile’s need to support TD-LTE and accelerate its commercial deployment in China,” explained Nitin Bhas, author of the Juniper Research report. “There are 36 commercial TD-LTE networks and we expect active TD-LTE connections to demonstrate a higher annual growth rate when compared to FD-LTE over the next five years.”
A recent report in The Wall Street Journal claimed that China Mobile planned to slash LTE pricing in an attempt to spur sluggish consumer uptake. China’s three largest mobile operators have reportedly also formed a joint venture to pool resources on rolling out LTE-equipped network infrastructure.
Juniper Research added that it expects Asian markets to account for a majority of LTE service revenues by 2019. Ericsson seemed to concur with the growing dominance of Asia in terms of LTE, noting that by 2019, the technology is expected to cover 95% of Northeast Asia’s population, with the forecast 700 million LTE connections representing more than 25% of the world’s total.
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Asia set to lead LTE connections past 1B in 2017
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