Telecom Lead America: HSPA mobile broadband technologies
in North America have crossed 100 million connections in 2011.
North America added 2 million users on the LTE network.
It is the leading region in the world for LTE with 71 percent of global LTE
subscriptions.
Latin America has 72 commercial deployments of HSPA in 31
countries, and of those, 32 have been upgraded to HSPA+ in 20 countries.
In addition, there are 5 commercial LTE networks in Latin
America and 300,000 LTE connections are expected by the end of 2012.
There are 8 commercial LTE networks in North America.
“To put the two million LTE net additions into
context, the much larger U.S. HSPA market added 5.4 million subscriptions in
fourth quarter 2011, and the U.S. CDMA market added 2.8 million. This shows
that growth in the U.S. mobile market is rapidly shifting to LTE,” said
Mike Roberts, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media.
Including Latin America, the Americas region is expected
to have more than 250 million 3GPP mobile broadband subscriptions by the end of
2012. That number is expected to more than double by 2015, and is forecasted to
reach more than 700 million subscriptions by 2016.
Of the 21 million new 3GPP technology connections added
in Q4, 9.5 million were HSPA in Latin America, meaning close to 50 percent of
net new subscriptions were mobile broadband connections. In 2011, Latin America
had more than 74 million HSPA connections included in the 604 million subscriptions
to GSM-HSPA to reach 95 percent market share of mobile connections in the
region.
“Before the end of this year, more than one billion
total subscriptions will be achieved for wireless technologies and the 3GPP
family of technologies will comprise 78 percent of the market. The shift has
been gradual over the last ten years, when GSM represented a small ten percent
of the market. With the growth of GSM, HSPA and LTE, the U.S. has become the
global leader for advanced technologies and Latin America is quickly adopting
these technologies as well,” said Chris Pearson, president of 4G Americas.
The Americas region had 768 million 3GPP technology
connections at the end of 2011, nearly one quarter of which were HSPA and LTE
mobile broadband subscriptions. More than 90 million new 3GPP subscriptions
were added in 2011, with 25.5 million added in fourth quarter.