November 26 2011: LTE is edging out WiMAX in global 4g mobile deployment, finds a study by Canada and US-based wireless market research and analysis company Maravedis. In India however WiMAX rollouts are ahead of 4G LTE.
Quarter over quarter subscriber increase for LTE and WiMAX was 250% and 12% respectively at the end of October 2011, according to the 16th issue of the 4GCounts, Maravedis’ online interactive Operator Tracking Service database and analysis profiling LTE & WiMAX operators worldwide on a quarterly basis.  The worldwide LTE industry reached 6.25 million subscribers at the end of Q3 2011 and
2.6GHz in combination with 800MHz and 1800MHz bands will be the dominant bands for LTE deployments in the future, the report suggests.At the end of Q3 2011, there were 206 major mobile operators committed to LTE. 182 operators were committed to launch FDD LTE, 24 operators were committed to launch TD-LTE and 35 operators were commercial with LTE.
Says Basharat Ashai, co-author of the report: “The region where more TD-LTE trials have been conducted is APAC with 12 operator’s trials, followed by Europe with 9 trials. Although we have seen some commercial TD-LTE deployments happening in 2011 outside Asia, these deployments will not drive the economies of scale expected from the deployments that will occur in China and India next year, and volume production of TD-LTE handsets will not be realized until the end of 2012. Carriers launching TD-LTE in 2011 and early 2012 will use devices such as USB dongles, data cards and routers. We now expect TD-LTE smartphones will be ready for commercial launch in early 2013.”
The most recent Maravedis 4G Subscriber Forecast (October 2011) predicts that LTE subscribers will
grow from 12 million in 2011 to 448 million in 2016. By the end of 2016, 80% of the LTE subscriber base or 350 million will be FDD LTE subscribers, while the remaining 20% or 97.5 million will be TD-LTE subscribers. We expect, that the TD-LTE subscriber uptake will commence in 2013
NSN-Motorola and Huawei had the lion's share of awarded LTE infrastructure contracts, with 29% and 26% respectively. Huawei, Ericsson, and Nokia Siemens are among the leading providers of LTE infrastructure for the top 50 LTE operators.
A Map of 4G deployments however shows all four 4G rollouts in India—BSNL, Airtel, Reliance and Tata are WiMAX rather than LTE: http://www.4gcounts.com/Samples/Worldwide_Map_of_Deployments_2011.pdf  . 36% of the total WiMAX devices sold in the last quarter were in the handset/smartphones category the report says.
Link to 4gcounts summary http://www.4gcounts.com/  

In related news, Nokia-Siemens Network says India’s connectivity status remains unchanged at position #21 globally: With a score of 1.25, India remains unchanged in 21st place amongst the resource and efficiency-driven economies on the Connectivity Scorecard 2011. In 2010, India finished 21st with a score of 1.82. The fundamentals of India’s performance have changed very little, and the fall in the score (although not the ranking) is due to the inclusion of new indicators and new weights that affected the relative performance of all countries. However, India’s high global profile in ICT is reflected in an unusually high score for the level of ICT services exports per capita, but the underlying gaps in broadband penetration and other forms of basic ICT (despite continued expansion in mobile penetration and relatively high levels of use among existing mobile subscribers) are clearly visible in the 2011 Connectivity Scorecard results as they were in previous editions of the Scorecard. http://www.connectivityscorecard.org/countries/india