5G Americas, a telecom industry body, has revealed the latest statistics on LTE and LTE Advanced deployments by telecoms.
Telecoms are making investments on 480 LTE networks in 157 countries, and 117 LTE Advanced networks in 57 countries.
The number of LTE connections is more than one billion in 2015 against 516 million in 2014.
LTE connections are forecast to reach close to four billion in 2020.
LTE global market share is forecast to reach 45 percent by 2020, said Ovum.
There are 7.3 billion total cellular connections worldwide.
Oceania and Asia Pacific added 343 million LTE connections, North America added 66 million and Western Europe added 64 million.
North America added 237 million LTE connections which covers more than half or 54 percent of all mobile connections in the region. Penetration of LTE in the U.S. was nearly 65 percent based on the country’s population of about 362 million.
There are 69 commercial LTE networks deployed in U.S. and Canada.
There are 7 commercial LTE-Advanced networks in North America.
There are 94 million HSPA connections in North America.
Latin America added 15 million LTE connections in the fourth quarter. Brazil alone added more than 7 million.
Latin America has 54 million LTE connections in 2015 against 13 million in 2014. HSPA currently has 325 million connections and GSM has declined to 317 million in Latin America.
Vina Krishna
editor@telecomlead.com