Analyst firm Juniper Research is predicting that with all the LTE networks launching around the world, revenues coming in from the new high speed cellular networking technology will reach $100 billion by the year 2014. They also say that a majority of that revenue will come from enterprise laptop and tablet users, and that consumer spending on LTE is not going to reach 50% of total spending until at least 2015. On an even more sour note, they say that people need to chill out with their expectations of the technology because there’s a high probability that they’re not going to see it for up to 3 years, citing Western Europe as an example.
The only major markets to have LTE right now are Sweden and Norway, both using operator TeliaSonera. Said operator was the first to launch an LTE network, way back in December 2009, and their users are seeing download speeds over 50 Mbps in some places and over 20 Mbps on average. Germany is due to get their high speed download on by Christmas, and the same can be said about Japan. America is a tricky story, since while Verizon Wireless is promising to launch their next generation network this month, they’ve been rather stingy on details, and the first products that will actually be able to connect to LTE are going to be nothing more than USB modems … which are not the most sexiest things on the market.
Whether or not operators use the term 4G in their marketing material is irrelevant. If they can deliver tangible performance improvements to users, then they’ve done their duty. MetroPCS comes to mind, since they’re using LTE to do nothing more than streaming video, and it’s on a rather anemic feature phone with a small screen. To really see LTE shine we’re going to have to wait at least 3 or 4 years for the next generation of mobile devices.