Critics often chide the United States for “lagging” in some measure of communications adoption. At various times in the past, that criticism has extended to use of mobile phones, text messaging, residential broadband and advanced mobile applications.
But U.S. consumers have shown an ability to adopt such innovations in relatively short order once the value was perceived. Nobody argues anymore that U.S. consumers somehow lag in use of any of those services.
More recently, the U.S. market has emerged as the leader in mobile applications, smart phone development and now will take leadership in 4G networks as well.
Verizon, MetroPCS, and AT&T will account for the majority of 4G Long Term Evolution connections globally by year-end 2011. Pyramid Research expects that U.S. mobile service providers, with seven million LTE connections, will account for 47 percent of the world’s LTE subscriptions.
LTE forecast
Pyramid expects 71 percent of 5.4 million global LTE handset sales will come from the United States in the near term. Separately, Informa Telecoms & Media projects something on the order of 600 million 4G subscriptions in service by about 2016.
The strong demand for mobile broadband in the U.S. market also will allow operators to quickly recoup spending on capital investments. Verizon and NTT Docomo, both the largest operators in their respective countries, each launched LTE in December 2010.