LTE Adoption Picking up the Pace

Since the first announcements of the rollout of LTE markets, there was very little doubt that the next generation of wireless networks was going to be pretty popular. A new study by ABI research is shedding some light on just how popular these new networks are getting. The study also indicates just how quickly cellular providers are rolling out the networks in order to keep up with the demand. In particular, the study shows that there will be more than 178 million LTE subscriptions by the end of 2013. Those subscriptions will be extremely valuable, totaling $74 billion in service revenues.

While those numbers are impressive, ABI research says that the numbers are going to be even more impressive going forward. “By 2018, LTE deployments should deliver population coverage of 57 percent (4.2 billion) and 31 percent (2.3 billion) in legacy WCDMA and CDMA2000 markets respectively. Significantly, LTE-TDD coverage should achieve 49 percent population coverage by the end of the five year period,” Jake Saunders, VP – core forecasting at ABI Research said in a recent release.

ABI says that LTE subscriptions over the first eight quarters of its existence has been quite a bit bigger and quite a bit faster than what industry analysts saw with 3G networks. The growth rate for LTE network adoption (47.5 million) is much higher than what was seen with WCDMA adoption (18.3 million) over the first eight quarters of its existence. Revenues for LTE networks are expected to be even more impressive by the end of 2018 when compared to the end of 2013. ABI says LTE revenues are going to be totaling as much as $530.5 billion by the end of 2018.

The most interesting thing about this particular study is that while LTE is picking up steam, advanced LTE is coming up quickly as well. There are significant testing ratings going on when it comes to advanced LTE but that testing should be entering the final stages in the next couple of years.