A new survey from Infonetics Research indicates that three fourths of the world's operators plan to deploy HSPA+ before LTE.
Infonetics surveyed 74 percent of the operators in the 3GPP camp, and they are unanimously planning to take the W-CDMA to HSPA+ to LTE.
"As we anticipated back in 2008, HSPA+ is the default bridge to LTE and there is mounting evidence that LTE is the bridge to 4G (aka LTE-Advanced)," said Stéphane Téral, principal analyst for mobile and FMC infrastructure at Infonetics Research in a statement. "The early LTE adopters had solid compelling reasons to move to LTE swiftly but the 3GPP crowd remains pragmatic and will not put the cart before the horse."
Just 11 percent of operators surveyed plan to deploy LTE as a greenfield network, Infonetics said. About two-thirds of operators don't know when they will test LTE-Advanced, while 5 percent of the carriers questioned said they are currently testing LTE-Advanced. Some 16 percent of respondents plan to trial LTE-Advanced in 2013. Forty seven percent of surveyed respondents said they would offer voice services three or more years after launching.
For more:
- see this TMCnet article
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