LTE 1800, 800 and TDD all gaining ground - GSA report

The Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) has just released a milestone update on all things mobile - how many networks, what technologies are being used, what services are getting traction, how many handsets use what bands? and so on.

Lots of new LTE networks were launched last year - in fact 96 of the current total of 360 LTE networks hit the airwaves in 2014 which indicates we’re still in a steep adoption phase, nothing surprising there. It’s worth noting, however, that total deployments in the old 1800 MHz band, usually previously dedicated to 2G services, are nearly double the number of the of deployments in the classic LTE 2.6 GHz (the band parcelled out by the LTE spectrum auctions). That’s currently running at 44 per cent of LTE deployments in 1800, and 25 per cent of deployments in 2600. Over 42 per cent of LTE handsets can run in the 1800 MHz band.

The much lower frequency 800 MHz (good at tackling walls) is declared the most popular sub 1 GHz coverage choice for LTE. It’s continued to gain share with almost 1 in 5 operators globally deploying networks using this spectrum.

LTE TDD (unpaired spectrum) is steadily gain ground against paired spectrum in FDD mode. LTE TTD has been championed in China but is now supported by 48 operators worldwide - more than 1 in 8 LTE operators.

LTE-Advanced carrier aggregation deployment was the major trend in 2014, with 49 operators launching LTE-Advanced in 31 countries.  GSA reckons almost 30 per cent of LTE operators are currently investing in LTE-Advanced technology.

All these numbers added up to a 373 million LTE subscriptions globally by Q3 2014 which represented a massive 131 per cent year-on-year growth rate. YoY growth. The balance of regional shares continued to shift to Asia, driven by impressive growth in China.

For information about LTE user devices see the Status of the LTE Ecosystem report, download via the link on http://www.gsacom.com