LTE adoption made impressive inroads across the world in 2013. It topped 200 million subscriptions by the time the year ended with over half of those being in North America alone.
LTE adoption was particularly strong in Canada and the U.S. in 2013. 22 million new LTE connections were added in Q4 alone to push the total number to 101 million, a 151% increase over 2012. According to the industry organization 4G Americas, that will jump to over 258 million by the end of 2018. According to Chris Pearson, President of 4G Americas:
“In the U.S. and Canada, LTE forges ahead with 26 percent market share at the end of 2013 on 46 commercial networks to date. As LTE is becoming a massively widespread next generation technology, encompassing a wide variety of networks, operators are starting to make the shift towards LTE-Advanced to further increase data speeds, network efficiency and improve connectivity.”
Four U.S. carriers, AT&T, T-Mobile USA, Sprint and Verizon, are expected to start deploying LTE-Advanced in 2014. In fact, AT&T already has started but only in Chicago and without a commercial announcement for now. Whether any Canadian carriers follow suit this year remains to be seen.
The numbers are just as impressive on a global scale: 200 million LTE subscriptions, up from 75 million at the end of 2012. There are now 274 commercial LTE networks up and running in 100 countries. There are also 7 commercial LTE-Advanced networks running as well. In all, there are now 6.8 billion total cellular connections across the world.
4G Americas expects that 2014 will continue to show rapid adoption for LTE.
Source : 4G Americas