LTE will not reach critical mass until 2014

According to Ovum, significant impact from long term evolution (LTE) will not occur in Australia until 2014, as networks are deployed nationally in digital dividend spectrum.

Ovum believes that LTE will be deployed predominately in urban areas using the 2.5 GHz and potentially other bands long before 2014. However, the big impact will come once digital dividend spectrum becomes available and national LTE rollouts commence of a then mature LTE technology. By end 2014, LTE will represent 10% of mobile connections in Australia.

“Demand for wireless data will continue to grow and extra capacity and lower cost per bit will be the strongest drivers of LTE, rather than incremental improvements in user experience, which will no doubt occur,” said Nathan Burley, Analyst. LTE will largely be an overlay, at least initially, in high traffic areas to allow carriers to deliver more capacity to more users.

“Like 3G, we see little advantage in being the first mover with LTE. Although not it’s first 3G strategy, Telstra Next G strategy demonstrates this. It deployed a mature 3G standard over 3 years after it was first offered by Hutchison in Australia,” adds Burley, who is based in Melbourne.

It is reasonable to expect LTE to mature slightly faster than 3G; however, its deployment in Australia should correspond broadly to what we saw with 3G UMTS, except around 7 years later. This means around 2014 is likely to correspond to the 3G experience of 2006/2007 when the technology started rapid adoption in the mass market.

Apart from the entry of Hutchison, Ovum believes 3G did not have any significant impact on revenue market share of Australian operators until CY H206. Subsequently, 3G helped stabilise ARPU, and HSPA has enabled the operators to build significant business from data.

LTE vendors such as Ericsson and Huawei will not be happy with this prognosis as they already have large LTE deployments in Europe and would have expected more action in Australia sooner.