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Post by Barry Manifiolia with Italy Broadband Suppliers, Inc

Between Q3 and Q4 of 2011, the LTE subscriber base nearly doubled in size, to reach 12.02 million subscribers worldwide, showing a rapid adoption of LTE at the expense of WiMAX, according to the 17th issue of the 4G Counts Quarterly Report from Maravedis.

The quarter-over-quarter subscriber increase for LTE and WiMAX was 92 percent and 14 percent, respectively, over that reported at the end of Q3 2011.

At the end of 2011, 54 operators worldwide had launched LTE commercially, 19 during the last quarter alone. An additional 224 major mobile operators committed to launching the technology in the future, 193 of those with FDD-LTE and 31 with TD-LTE.

"Maravedis anticipates that 469 million LTE subscribers will be active by 2016, of which 25 percent or 118 million will be TD-LTE users and the rest — 75 percent or 350 million — will be FDD-LTE," said Cintia Garza, 4GCounts team leader.

The region where the most TD-LTE trials have been taking place during Q4 2011 is Asia Pacific, with 18 operators trialing the technology, followed by Europe with five trials.

"Although we have seen some commercial TD-LTE deployments happening in 2011 outside Asia, these deployments will not drive the substantial economies of scale expected from the larger deployments in China and India this year," said Basharat Ashai, co-author of the report.

In Q4 2011, NSN-Motorola and Huawei enjoyed the lion's share of awarded LTE contracts, with 26 percent and 23 percent respectively. Nokia Siemens Networks delivered the TD-LTE network and USB dongles for the commercial launch of SKY in Brazil, becoming the first TD-LTE network in Latin America. Alcatel-Lucent took 12 percent of the contracts, and is expected to land further LTE infrastructure contracts in Latin America, potentially in Chile, Colombia and Brazil.

The majority of LTE devices available today support the 700MHz band because the predominant LTE deployments are from U.S. operators Verizon Wireless and AT&T, which operate in that band.

"We believe, however, that the number of devices covered in the 2.6 GHz band will soon exceed the devices deployed in the 700MHz. The 2.6GHz has been widely allocated for mobile broadband across the world in both FDD and TD-LTE modes," Garza said. "We believe that multimode and multi-frequency devices will gradually become the norm."

AFRICA LTE IS HERE............

Kenya aims to roll out its open-access Long Term Evolution (LTE) network by 2013, Bitange Ndemo, permanent secretary at the Ministry of Information and Communications, has told Reuters. Speaking on the sidelines of a joint US-Kenya conference on infrastructure projects, Ndemo commented: ‘We need to have it before the next elections [due in March 2013].

 

That is what we are targeting. We have finished with the study. We have sent it to the Ministry of Finance.

 

We are just waiting for the approval and then we hit the road. In Phase One we will go to the counties and leverage the existing base stations. It is an open access model. We cannot set it up until we get the approval from Treasury. They can take one month or two months. But it is going to be very soon’.

 

He estimated the cost of a nationwide LTE deployment at somewhere in the region of USD500 million.

As previously reported by TeleGeography’s CommsUpdate, confirmed participants in the open-access project include: domestic mobile operators Safaricom, Airtel Kenya, Essar Telecom Kenya (yu) and Telkom Kenya (Orange Kenya); local broadband providers Kenya Data Networks (KDN) and MTN Business Kenya; and international vendors Alcatel-Lucent (France-US), Epesi Technologies (US) and Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN, Finland).