3G Has Mobile Broadband Volume, Even if 4G is the Future

Long Term Evolution might be the global network of choice over the next 10 to 15 years but right now, it is 3G that represents the bulk of net subscriber additions and installed base of users.

Industry organization 4G Americas reports that HSPA (third generation) mobile broadband technologies in North America passed 100 million connections by the end of 2011. By way of comparison, there were 5.3 million Long Term Evolution subscribers, and representing 71 percent of global LTE subscribers.

In North America, about 60 percent of the LTE subscriber base was added just in the fourth quarter of 2011, reflecting the growing marketing emphasis on LTE services, plus the availability of LTE handsets.

“To put the two million LTE net additions into context, the much larger U.S. HSPA market added 5.4 million subscriptions in fourth quarter 2011, and the U.S. CDMA market added 2.8 million,” says Mike Roberts, Informa Telecoms & Media principal analyst

The group expects the Americas region to have more than 250 million 3GPP mobile broadband subscriptions by the end of 2012; and that number is expected to more than double by 2015, to reach more than 700 million subscriptions by 2016.

Latin America saw tremendous uptake of mobile broadband across the region. Of the 21 million new 3GPP technology connections added in the fourth quarter, 9.5 million were HSPA, meaning close to 50 percent of net new subscriptions were mobile broadband connections. At the end of 2011, Latin America had more than 74 million HSPA connections included in the 604 million subscriptions to GSM-HSPA to reach an incredible 95 percent market share of all mobile connections in the region.
 
The Americas region had 768 million 3GPP technology connections at the end of 2011, nearly one quarter of which were HSPA and LTE mobile broadband subscriptions. More than 90 million new 3GPP subscriptions were added in 2011, with 25.5 million added in fourth quarter.

Mobile broadband deployments continue to progress in the Americas. To date:
 

• Latin America has 72 commercial deployments of HSPA in 31 countries, and of those, 32 have been upgraded to HSPA+ in 20 countries
• In addition, there are 5 commercial LTE networks in Latin America and 300,000 LTE connections are expected by the end of 2012
• There are 8 commercial LTE networks in North America

Today, LTE is commercial on 57 networks in 34 countries with more than 100 total commercial networks expected by the end of 2012. With 22 million connections forecasted for LTE worldwide by year-end 2012, that number will grow to an estimated 63 million by year-end 2013, and expand to 156 million at the end of 2014, according to Informa’s research. 







Edited by Jennifer Russell