Trade association 4G Americas Monday released a report conducted by Informa Telecoms & Media that shows there were approximately 200 million LTE connections in Decemeber 2013. The United States and Canada accounted for fifty percent of those connections.
The report estimates that in North America and Latin America, LTE and HSPA mobile broadband grew to 417 million connections in one year ending December 2013, and now represents over one third of all mobile connections in the Americas region.
Chris Pearson, president of 4G Americas, noted that LTE had grabbed 26 percent market share in the United States and Canada at the end of 2013.
“As LTE is becoming a massively widespread next generation technology, encompassing a wide variety of networks, operators are starting to make the shift towards LTE-Advanced to further increase data speeds, network efficiency and improve connectivity,” Pearson said in a statement.
According to the report, North America added 22 million new LTE subscriptions in the fourth quarter of 2013, followed by the Asia Pacific (11.6 million additions) and Western Europe (5 million).
In the United States, Informa expects the four major carriers will all deploy LTE-Advanced in 2014.
AT&T has deployed LTE-Advanced with Carrier Aggregation in the Chicago market already, though without a commercial announcement and with several other cities on stream, becoming the first such deployment of LTE carrier aggregation in the U.S.
