LTE Subscriber Base Growing Worldwide

Technology has made rapid strides over the last few years, and this development is most evident in the mobile world. The advent of many new mobile devices and the emergence of high-speed networks have increased mobile usage worldwide. One such technology that has contributed to this mobile growth is Long Term Evolution (LTE), a telecommunication standard that makes 4G speeds possible for users. LTE is the next generation version of the existing 3G UMTS network that can offer download speeds in the range of 15 Mpbs and upload speeds of around 10 Mbps.

Due to these high speeds, LTE has become the de-facto choice for many mobile providers and users. As of November 2013, there were 230 commercial LTE providers catering to customers in 88 countries worldwide. Many of these providers are located in North America, Australia, Brazil, India, Russia, Western Europe, Japan, Philippines, Saudi Arabia and South Africa. Out of these, the U.S. is the biggest market, as its two leading providers AT&T and Verizon Wireless provide 4G coverage to 97 percent of the country. Other companies such as Sprint and T-Mobile are also beefing up their LTE networks to improve 4G connectivity.

The good news is that other countries are also catching up. In Europe, there are 96 providers and more companies joining the LTE bandwagon by upgrading their network speeds. Overall, Asia has a penetration rate of 39 percent, and this is expected to increase to 47 percent by 2017 while Europe's penetration rate is expected to increase from the current nine percent to 20 percent by 2017. In terms of the number of subscribers; there are already more than 250 million connections and this number is expected to reach 1,344 million by December 2018.