Report: LTE growth to ramp faster than expected

Citing recent interviews with carriers committed to deploying LTE networks, Infonetics Research recently increased its forecasts for the worldwide LTE infrastructure market and subscriber forecasts.
The firm said it expects the LTE infrastructure market to grow 10-fold between 2010 and 2014 to $11.5 billion “fueled by macrocell eNodeB deployments and the rapidly growing number of operators committing to LTE.” That network growth is expected to support a now anticipated 165 million LTE customers worldwide by 2014. Infonetics noted that a dozen LTE networks are set to be live by the end of this year with more than 100 carrier commitments to deploy the technology.
As for deployment strategies, Infonetics said that 72% of those carriers surveyed will follow the W-CDMA/HSPA+/LTE network evolution paths; 94% plan to deploy IMS; and 39% expect to launch voice service over LTE one year after network launch.
“As we anticipated back in 2008, today HSPA+ has become the clear bridge between 3G (e.g., W-CDMA and CDMA2000) and LTE,” explained Stephan Teral, principal analyst for mobile and fixed-mobile infrastructure at Infonetics. “Current networks won’t disappear anytime soon and early LTE networks will only carry data while voice services will fall back to good old circuit switched networks before LTE deployments start to ramp up in 2012. We’re still at a very early stage for LTE with HSPA/HSPA+ rollouts, which are poised to enjoy a long tail.”