At the end of the first quarter of this year there were only 320,000 people using 4G LTE according to analysts at Maravedis. That number is going to swell to 305 million by 2016, and while it’s a bit reckless to make a prediction that goes 5 years into the future, we think they’re onto something. The analysts go on to say that by the end of this year they’ll be 59 FDD-LTE and 3 LTE TDD networks up and fully operational. The differences between FDD and TDD have to do with how the spectrum is allocated, but for the sake of simplicity think of it as FDD having one channel going up and one channel going down while TDD has only one channel that alternates between going up and down. Which frequencies will be put to use for LTE? In Europe it’s likely that dual mode 800 MHz, 2600 MHz will be the norm, while in America most everyone will use 700 MHz, except for Clearwire who, assuming they even switch to LTE, will use their existing 2500 MHz holdings.
Now about WiMAX, at the end of Q1 2011 there were 17.25 million people using it with a fairly even 34%, 25% and 30% split between handsets, fixed modems, and USB dongles being used to access the network. That same ratio is likely not going to be seen when you look at future LTE figures since they’ll be a greater number of LTE phones out on the market thanks to the vast numbers of of LTE networks around the world.
What Maravedis fails to talk about is HSPA+ and operators opting to milk that technology for as long as they can before finally jumping to something like LTE Advanced once it becomes a standard. That’s a much more attractive option if you’re a smaller operator or just want to save some money while rolling out networks.