The Global Mobile Suppliers Association (GSA) has released its latest figures on the state of the LTE ecosystem around the world, showing the number of device manufacturers has increased by 44 per cent in the past year.
There are now 1,240 different LTE-enabled devices on the market, manufactured by 120 different produces.
LTE has been slow to take off in Africa, but Huawei alone has more than 44 LTE networks built on the continent although many remain dormant as network operators await market readiness to make them commercially viable.
One element holding LTE deployment and penetration back in Africa is the cost of LTE-enabled devices which would give users access.
HumanIPO reported in July representatives from African mobile networks lamented the fact there was little more than 600,000 LTE-enabled SIM cards across the continent.
Regarding the latest GSA report on devices, Alan Hadden, president of the GSA, said: “With several operators now deploying LTE-Advanced features, particularly carrier aggregation in the first phase, we identified a good choice of Cat 4 devices in the market including CPEs, personal hotspots, modules, smartphones, tablets and dongles.”
The GSA expects there to be 260 live commercial LTE networks worldwide by the end of 2013.
