LTE Market Ready for Peak

With technologies like VoLTE only getting more popular these days, it’s no wonder that one report after another says LTE adoption is only going to grow. The market research firm Infonetics has underlined this with a new report that tracks more than 50 categories of equipment, software, and subscribers. The report indicates that 2015 is going to be the year that the LTE market peaks.

“In the mobile infrastructure market, the third quarter of 2014 was almost a carbon copy of last quarter, and we are now reaching the peak of plain LTE rollouts, which are so brisk in China that they are overshadowing strong activity in Europe, the Middle East, and Russia,” Stéphane Téral, principal analyst for mobile infrastructure and carrier economics at Infonetics Research commented in the report.

Other aspects of this new study showed that operators are currently spending about $5.6 billion per quarter on LTE. This amount of spending has led to Infonetics raising its predictions on revenue for 2014 to $45.4 billion, an increase from $43 billion in 2013. The company has also seen heavy investments in the technology actually get spent a year earlier, in 2014 than was originally believed to happen. This is another reason why Infonetics believes that 2015 will be the year of LTE.

The simple fact is that more people are expecting LTE connections to be available to them in their areas and on their phones. In the business and private worlds, Voice over LTE (VoLTE) is becoming all the rage, simply because the connection quality is so much better than its predecessor. Cities big and small are starting to work more aggressively with mobile carriers in order to offer this service on a broad scale.

When it comes to LTE revenue, Nokia Networks is still the king of this particular industry. Its strong performances both in the United States and China was a big reason for this success.