ABI: TD-LTE to cover more than 50% of Asian population by 2018

LTE network deployments are growing rapidly across the globe, and those based on time-division duplex (TDD) are gaining more market traction, according to a new report from ABI Research.

In Asia-Pacific, TD-LTE networks will cover more than 53 per cent of the population by 2018 at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41.1 per cent between 2012 and 2018, while frequency-division duplex (FDD) networks will reach 49 per cent population coverage by the end of 2018.

"The increase of LTE-TDD population coverage is mainly driven by wide deployment in some Asian countries with large populations, such as China, India, and Japan," said Marina Lu, research associate at ABI Research. "Due to its complementarity of using unpaired spectrum, a number of LTE-FDD operators will expand their networks with LTE-TDD in additional spectrum to improve network capacity."

Among Asia-Pacific's recently completed, ongoing, and upcoming LTE spectrum auctions, 25 per cent concern 2.6 GHz 25 per cent 1,800 MHz, and 20 per cent 800 MHz, which is consistent with the popularity of the 2.6 GHz band for TD-LTE networks. Release