At the end of Q3 2011, 35 operators had commercially launched FDD LTE. "LTE adoption is accelerating. Maravedis anticipates that there will be 448 million LTE subscribers by 2016, of which 20% will be TD-LTE users," said Cintia Garza, 4GCounts team leader.

The region where the most TD-LTE trials have been conducted is APAC with 12 operator's trials, followed by Europe with 9 trials. "Although we have seen some commercial TD-LTE deployments happening in 2011 outside Asia, these deployments will not drive the economies of scale expected from the deployments that will occur in China and India next year, and volume production of TD-LTE handsets will not be realized until the end of 2012. We now expect TD-LTE smartphones will be ready for commercial launch in early 2013," said Basharat Ashai, co-author of the report.

This quarter, NSN-Motorola and Huawei had the lion's share of awarded LTE infrastructure contracts, with 29% and 26% respectively.Huawei, Ericsson, and Nokia Siemens are among the leading providers of LTE infrastructure for the top 50 LTE operators.

THIS QUARTER'S SUMMARY FINDINGS:

• The majority of the LTE devices available today support the 700MHz band because the predominant LTE deployments are from US operators Verizon Wireless and AT&T.
• By 2016, smartphones, USB dongles and tablets will dominate the 4G device market, accounting for 47%, 20% and 16% of the total 4G device market share respectively.
• 36% of the total WiMAX devices sold in the last quarter were in the handset/smartphones category