Huawei bags 1/3 of LTE contracts

Huawei is the LTE market leader in terms of contracts signed, accounting for more than a third of the deals signed to date.

That’s more than twice as many as 4G deals as the nearest rivals, Ericsson and Nokia Siemens, according to TeleGeography.

Of course, the bulk of those deals are with developing market operators. When it comes to the dollars, Ericsson is still the global champion.

Ericsson is also behind some of the high-profile early deployments, such as the TeliaSonera’s network, which went live last December, and the first US LTE launch by MetroPCS last month.

Ericsson, Nokia Siemens and Alcatel-Lucent all did well in 3G and have claimed more than half of the 4G contracts so far, TeleGeography points out.

Huawei has signed 18 contracts for commercial LTE deployments – or 36% of the total - including deals with some major players including TeliaSonera, Vodafone Germany and China Mobile.

Twelve LTE networks have been deployed, with two tier one operators – Verizon Wireless and NTT DoCoMo – due to light up by year-end.

To this number add one more - Hong Kong’s CSL, which will unwrap its 4G service this afternoon, using a network built by Huawei’s rival ZTE.

According to an Infonetics forecast in April, the LTE infrastructure market will top $11.4 billion by 2014, buoyed by Chinese rollouts starting from 2012.