Telecom Lead India: Increased average revenue per user
(ARPU) is among the top LTE upgrade drivers, along with spectral efficiencies
that are driving down the cost per gigabyte. As a result, operators’ bottom
line should improve for a change, according to Infonetics Research.
Almost 1/3 of the operators that Infonetics surveyed plan to use their 2G and 3G networks for voice services as long as possible.
TD-LTE continues to gain momentum, spearheaded by China Mobile’s participation in the LTE standards process.
In India, Bharti Airtel is the only operator to launch
TD-LTE services in Bangalore and Kolkata circles in association with Huawei and ZTE, respectively.
Infonetics Research said single radio voice call continuity (SRVCC) is on track to become commercially available in Fall 2012, but 84 percent of operators surveyed don’t expect the feature to be ready this year.
EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa) leads in the number of
LTE deployments worldwide, while North America is home to 80 percent of the
more than 10 million global LTE subscribers.
Stephane Teral, principal analyst for mobile infrastructure
and carrier economics at Infonetics Research, said for the first time since we
began tracking LTE in 2008, increased average revenue per user is among the top
LTE upgrade drivers.
