7.2 million WiMAX subscribers reached in Q1 2010

MONTREAL, CANADA: 2.3 million BWA/WiMAX subscribers were added in 2009 according to the 11th issue of the 4GCounts Quarterly Report from Maravedis.

Yota's decision to migrate its network to LTE appears quite political, and is negatively impacting the WiMAX ecosystem and deployment plans of other WiMAX players. "Carriers are worried about the perceived lack of commitment towards 802.16m," said Maravedis Research Director Adlane Fellah. "However despite the hype surrounding TD-LTE, we do not see much of an ecosystem in the near term."

"Spectrum winners, especially those in India, cannot afford to wait 2-3 years before deploying TD-LTE while WIMAX deployments move forward," said Cintia Garza, 4GCounts Team Leader. "If a carrier deploys WiMAX now with the intention of migrating to TD-LTE in the future, a significant challenge emerges regarding how to manage the millions of WiMAX device users."

Maravedis anticipates that 18 LTE networks will be operational worldwide by the end of this year. "However, most of them will be covering reduced areas in their respective countries, so we expect multimode 3G-LTE USB dongles to be crucial for LTE services to attract customers," noted report co-author Esteban Monturus.

Mobile data usage continues to grow across technologies. "While large wireless carriers such as AT&T are moving away from unlimited data plans, Clearwire continues to offer these," commented the report's other co-author Basharat Ashai.

This quarter's select key findings
* The residential and business WiMAX ARPU generated among operators during Q1 2010 across all regions was of $42 and $21, respectively.
* Total BWA?WiMAX revenues for the full year 2009 totaled $3.03 billion, compared to $1.69 billion at the end of 2008.
* Indoor modems have the largest market share, accounting for over 3.6 million units or 62 percent, followed by 1.11 million USB dongles and 528,000 PCMCIA cards.
* The base station sectors installed base as of Q1 2010 totaled 308,006.