4G will Grow 33% Faster than 3G, Juniper Predicts

It took nearly six years for third generation mobile services based on UMTS/HSPA to reach 100 million subscribers but it will take Long Term Evolution just four years to reach the same milestone, say researchers at Juniper Research.

The number of LTE subscriptions worldwide will grow at a cumulative average growth rate of 404 percent from 2010 to 2014 and reach 136 million subscriptions by year-end 2014, Juniper forecasts.

You might think this has something to do with spectrum efficiency, more efficient coding, signal propagation or some other technology attribute, but if the forecast proves accurate, it will be more a result of a changed mobility market than anything else.

When 3G networks were launched, the expectation was that new data services would fuel revenue growth. That largely failed to happen, at least early on. What is different now is that mobile broadband is approaching mass market status.

Mobile broadband demand is growing about 30 percent a year, while video usage is growing only a bit slower.