BWA/WiMAX Subscriber Base Reached 13 Million in Q4 2010

Maravedis releases latest market statistics on 4G

With more than 600 deployments and over 213 devices and 61 base stations certified, the worldwide WiMAX industry accounted for over 13 million subscribers at the end of Q4 2010. However, the top 50 WiMAX operators accounted for an accumulated 8.34 million of these subscribers, indicating this is a highly concentrated industry. Maravedis predicts the BWA/WiMAX subscriber base to reach 18.5 million by the end of 2011, while LTE subscribers will reach 6.5 million.

Maravedis anticipates that 58 FDD-LTE and 3 TD-LTE networks will be operational worldwide by the end of 2011, while the number of FDD-LTE and TD-LTE operator commitments will reach 222 and 25, respectively. "As several 4G spectrum auctions take place in the first half of 2011 (mainly in Europe) more operators will feel the need to confirm their plans regarding LTE," said Esteban Monturus, co-author of the report.

In India operators are preparing to deploy LTE in the recently allocated 2.3 GHz TDD spectrum. Reliance has finally confirmed its plan to deploy TD-LTE technology to build out its 4G network. "The momentum has shifted to TD-LTE among Indian BWA licensees," confirmed report co-author Basharat Ashai.

"We believe that nearly 55% of the operators committed to LTE today will use FDD, with potential of adding TDD in the long term. 25% will use FDD-LTE and are unlikely to deploy TDD at all. Generally speaking, operators are looking for hybrid networks in which they can have a mixed deployment of both TDD and FDD so as to take advantage of their spectrum resources in both domains," explained 4GCounts Team Leader Cintia Garza. "TD-LTE will grow selectively in countries with TDD spectrum allocations, including China, Germany, Malaysia and India."

Mobile data traffic continues to grow faster than revenues for mobile operators. Operators have various alternatives to manage the data traffic explosion, such as increasing number of cell sites, migrating to newer technologies, use low frequency spectrum, etc. However introducing usage-based pricing is the easiest way for operators to manage users' expectations and behavior.

THIS QUARTER'S SUMMARY FINDINGS - TOP 50 WiMAX OPERATORS:

•  WiMAX ARPU generated among the top 50 WiMAX operators during Q4 2010 across all regions was US$37.98 (reidential) and US$71.45 (business).
•  Total year-end revenues for the top 50 WiMAX operators in 2010 totaled US$2.42 billion, compared to US$970.55 million in 2009.
•  Among the top 50 WiMAX operators, handsets have the largest market share accounting for over 2.59 million units, or 31%, followed by 2.42 million USB dongles (29%) and 2.35 million PCMCIA cards (28%).
• The base station sectors installed base as of Q4 2010 totaled 449,988 globally and 269,845 for the top 50 WiMAX operators.

4GCounts is a unique web-based service that tracks 4G Operator deployments and provides detailed information on the worldwide 4G ecosystem.