By 2014, LTE services will generate 50 percent of last-mile backhaul demand in North America, say researchers at In-Stat. LTE will be available to 1.85 billion people globall
Despite the potential for LTE services in China and India, Japan is very likely to have the most LTE subscribers in Asia/Pacific by the end of 2014.
Neither Sprint nor Clearwire executives have been too shy about saying they both could switch to Long Term Evolution for fourth-generation services, rather than using the WiMAX platform. In fact, if either firm wants to benefit from LTE ecosystem experience curves, they would have to. It is a foregone conclusion that the LTE ecosystem, from base station solutions to handsets, is going to eclipse the WiMAX ecosystem in relatively short order.
But network transitions of that sort can be messy in the interim, as the operator has to continue to support existing users and devices that operate on the older platform, while adding new users to the next-generation platform. If Sprint intends to shift to LTE on its fully-owned spectrum, that means adding LTE to the network now running CDMA.
Clearwire has other options, as it can light a separate LTE network alongside its existing WiMAX network.
In an interim period, while lots of users continue to use CDMA gear, Sprint would likely introduce new devices that support both CDMA and LTE. There are some cost considerations, but it is an approach mobile operators and suppliers are quite familiar with.
That move would need to be made at some point even as Sprint continues to use Clearwire facilities, as the CDMA network itself will have to be entirely replaced at some point by a 4G solution.