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Wireless Broadband Growth Shows Signs of Recovery
This week telecom market research firm Maravedis revealed further details from its research on the growth and deployments of next-generation wireless broadband networks.
Despite the bleak economic conditions at the first of the year, operators are
starting to show signs of recovery with increases in subscribers and service
revenue growth. This was based on analysis from
Maravedis and its 4G Counts service
that tracks 4G operator deployments and provides details on the 4G ecosystem
from over 200 operators in 92 countries.
The Maravedis webinar presented earlier in the week provided breakdowns of
network deployments, leading 4G operators, applications, usage and pricing.
According to the firm, approximately 560,000 BWA/WiMAX subscribers were added in
Q2 2009 - a 74% year-over-year growth rate since Q2 2008. The total number
of BWA (broadband wireless access) and WiMAX subscribers was around 4 million at
the end of June 2009.
Based on their survey, 332, BWA/WiMAX networks had been deployed as of June 2009
of which 42% were for fixed WiMAX (802.16d) networks, 37% for mobile WiMAX
(802.16e) networks, and the remaining 21% for proprietary networks. Also,
an additional 39 operators had committed to deploying LTE networks sometime in
the future.
The number of fixed WiMAX networks were hightest in Europe, while the most
mobile WiMAX networks were reported in the Asia/Pacific region.
Maravedis also presented the top 22 WiMAX operators Globaly in terms of the
number of subscribers. Toping the list was Clearwire in the US with over
500K subscribers, followed by Inukshuk in Canada, Korea Telecom, and Telmex
International and Axtel in Mexico.
Also interesting was the large amount of data usage reported by some operators
from their customers. Both Tatung in Taiwan and Scartel in Russia reported
close to 10GB per month of usage by their subscribers, driving by unlimited data
plans and fixed rate pricing.
The webinar also highlighted some of the limitation and challenges faced by LTE
operators including lack of harmonized spectrum, delays in the availability of
LTE devices, interoperability/standardization and possible lack of funding
caused by the economic recession.
Also emphasized were the time-to-market and wide ecosystem advantages of WiMAX,
the strength of LTE with the support of the largest mobile players, and the need
for 3G operators to continue to address traffic growth on their networks.
The recent growth numbers are encouraging news for the industry and show the
demand for broadband, especially in emerging markets. We expect that the
number of WiMAX subscribers in the next update of 4G Counts to increase
substantially with the inclusion of Russian WiMAX operator Yota which reportedly
reached 200,000 subscribers in early October, as well as Clearwire in the US
with its major market launches planned in Q4.
