Approximately 400,000 WiMAX subscribers and 50 million new active 3G subscribers were added in Q1 2009, says Canadian telecoms analyst company Maravedis.
The average WiMAX subscriber growth rate was 13% over Q4 2008, says a report from Maravedis, and there was a 75% year-over-year growth rate since Q1 2008.
"Global service revenue growth is tapering off as WiMAX operators experience ARPU stagnation and subscriber growth slow down," says Maravedis CEO and founder, Adlane Fellah.
The report's co-author, Cintia Garza: "2008 was a difficult year for WiMAX and during Q1 2009, the slowdown continued as operators watched their wallets closely in order to survive the downturn."
Q1 2009 recorded WiMAX ARPU was US$42.43 and US$116.82 for residential and business segments respectively, compared to US$42.33 and US$122.64 for the same segments in Q4 2008.
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Clearwire USA continues to be the top BWA/WIMAX operator in terms of the number of subscribers. The operator had 500,000 subscribers at the end of Q1 2009, an increase of 5% compared with 475,000 reported in Q4 2008
See also: Electronics Weekly's Focus on WiMAX
The report explores the motivations for 3G operators to invest in LTE and what challenges they will face when adopting this technology.
"Our research reveals that 37% of operators consider LTE as their best option available today to address the need for higher bandwidth services and capacity, while 15% believe LTE will give them added flexibility to use different spectrum bands," says co-author Basharat Ashai.
The top 30 mobile operators committed to LTE accounted in Q1 2009 for 1.1bn mobile subscribers, of which 447m correspond to China Mobile. Many of these subscribers are served with GSM, 3G or HSPA technologies and will be migrated to LTE in the future.
28% of operators pointed to technological delays as the main challenge for adopting LTE; 24% revealed that interoperability between the LTE vendors is a concern; 10% pointed to the lack of spectrum/delayed auctions as a challenge.