LTE connections grew by more than one billion connections or 43 percent from June 2017 to June 2018, a 5G Americas report said.
Research firm Ovum said the LTE market share reached 42.3 percent at the end of the second quarter of 2018 with LTE connections reaching 3.6 billion.
Latin America and the Caribbean added 82 million new LTE subscriptions with 52 percent growth year over year from June 2017.
Latin America region had nearly 241 million LTE connections on commercial LTE networks across all countries.
North America had 376 million LTE connections after adding 52 million new LTE customers from Q2 2017 to Q2 2018 — with a penetration rate over 103 percent.
LTE is forecast to reach 491 million connections including M2M in North America in 2021. There will be 31.2 million 5G connections in North America in 2021, representing 5 percent of all North America 5G connections — growing to 113.9 million 5G connections in 2022.
LTE is forecast to reach over 5.6 billion connections in 2022 with LTE market share of 60 percent globally. 5G will have almost 400 million connections worldwide by 2022.
