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4G marches on – LTE soon to reach majority of world’s population

November 3rd, 2011 General

Fourth generation or 4G mobile networks promise quicker connections enabling users to do more while on the go. There’s quite some confusion in this area what 4G really is and what technologies can be called 4G or not. 3GPP Long Term Evolution, or LTE for small, seems to be the technology that currently shows the most promise to be able to cut the Ethernet umbilical cord and set us free. Additional than the promise of speeds in excess of 100 Mbps, why should you be excited in this area LTE coming to where you live?

Fresh numbers [PDF] from Informa Telecoms & Media show a majority of the world’s populace will have the the option of LTE for mobile broadband soon, with around ten percent by now living where LTE is running. We crunched the numbers and here are the key facts:

Around 13% of the world’s populace live in countries where there are by now running LTE implementations or where LTE is being deployed.
Another 41% of the populace live in countries where LTE is in trials, counting countries like China and India.
Finally, another 24% of the world’s populace are awaiting LTE, with intended or launch to be chose status on LTE in their countries.

Note that this doesn’t take into account how widespread the actual implementations by operators are.

Out of all mobile subscriptions, LTE will for the foreseeable future account for only a small percentage of worldwide subscriptions. Less than 1%, in fact, and, according to Informa Telecoms & Media, LTE will account for just 8% still by 2016. If we place this in terms of actual subscribers instead, ABI Research predicts that there will be 16 million LTE subscribers by the end of 2011, which, if right, is a drastic rise from the 1.9 million subscribers in the second quarter of the year, stated by Informa Telecoms & Media, out of which 1.8 million are in the US and Canada.

Clearly the largest growth potential for LTE is outside traditional markets such as North America and Western Europe.

Picture courtesy of LTEMaps. In the picture, a red marker per public for all operators to show commitments and a blue marker to show actual deployments.

4G diplomacy slowly emerging

The Global movable Suppliers Association (GSA) published an update to its Evolution of LTE report, confirming that 248 operators “have committed to money-making LTE arrangement deployments or are engaged in trials, technology testing or studies.” GSA also stated that 197 LTE diplomacy aimed at users have been announced, spanning 48 manufacturers.

So far we’ve not seen a huge amount of 4G-capable diplomacy but major manufacturers such as Motorola and Samsung have by now introduced both smartphones and tablets supporting 4G, and more is coming from them and others. In the “Worldwide LTE movable Phone 2011-2014 Forecast”, IDC analyst Ramon T. Llamas predicts that by end of this year, mobile phone vendors will ship a total of 5.5 million LTE mobile phones worldwide. That is still dwarfed by the worldwide shipments of an expected 420 million smartphones in 2011.

At Pingdom we’ve seen real life LTE demonstrations with download speeds of around 82 Mbps and upload speeds of around 67 Mbps. That’s not far from the stated LTE peak rates of 100 Mbps down and 50 Mbps up. To place that into perspective, Akamai’s most recent Disorder of the Internet report for Q2 2011, shows an average connection speed from South Korea, the public usually rated as having the fastest Internet speed in the world, of nearly 14 Mbps and 58% of connections to Akamai from there running at speeds over 5 Mbps.

Also, the Pingdom office is located in an area where a 4G arrangement was launched over a year ago, promising speeds of up to 80 Mbps.

Real benefit or buzzword?

But is LTE just the royal leader’s new clothes, dazzling us with quicker speeds but offering small else?

There’s no denying that not being tied to the ethernet jack in the wall is a fantastic attraction but what’s fascinating will be what that speed offers us in terms of what we can do with it.

On a public level, something like LTE can mean the ability to develop telecommunications and skip ahead. By now back in 2008, China was reported as having surpassed the US as the number one public in the world in terms of Internet users. Earlier this year, Forbes reported that, according to China’s Telecommunications Administration Bureau, there are 477 million Internet users in the public. But as incredible as those numbers may be, China still lags in the backwaters of the Internet when it comes to connection speeds. Akamai’s figures show that the average connection speed in China climbed to just over 1 Mbps, with an average peak connection speed just over 4.6 Mbps. Also, the high broadband adoption speed (connections to Akamai quicker than 5 Mbps) is lingering in low single digits (0.5%) and even broadband adoption (speeds of more than 2 Mbps) is very low at 9.3%.

On a user level, higher mobile broadband speeds offer the possibility of new applications like virtual and greater than before reality, HD video streaming, and HD video conferencing. The development toward quicker mobile broadband speeds go hand in hand with the development to quicker processing power and more storage capacity in mobile diplomacy. With dual-core processors and gigabytes of space, that part of the equation seems to be solved. Apps and additional software that take advantage of the new speed and power is arguably the next frontier.

Next: will telcos manage?

With increased speed comes increased volumes of up- and downloads. Telcos around the world have by now been complaining in this area smartphones and tablets sucking up too much bandwidth, and more recently in this area “chatty” apps that poll in the background, taking up even more of the scarce space in the wireless pipes. Will telcos manage with users filling up the space as LTE rolls out around the world? That’s a question for another blog post.

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4G marches on – LTE soon to reach majority of world’s populace