Research firm IDATE has today revealed that the next generation of superfast LTE (Long Term Evolution) based Mobile Broadband services will have 371 Million subscribers worldwide in 2015. The USA and Asia are expected to drive most of this growth, while the first UK based LTE services won't surface until the end of 2013 or early 2014 (Ofcom's Timetable).

Based on modelling results and considering the case of a Mobile Network Operator (MNO) already running GSM and 3G networks, IDATE suggests that the total cumulated investment for the LTE RAN overlay deployment from 2011 to 2018 will come to 335 million Euros.

IDATE also recently predicted that global mobile internet penetration would reach 37% (2.67 Billion users) by 2015 (here), which is up from 20% in 2010. Mobile internet services will then generate access revenues of GBP139bn (161bn Euros).

Today most UK mobile users can expect to receive average download speeds of around 2Mbps on current 3G / HSPA based technology. The first generation of 3G / LTE should push peak speeds up to around 150Mbps+, although Ericsson hinted in 2009 that real world performance would probably be closer to 10Mbps.

Future 4G / LTE Advanced services will push peak speeds to 1Gbps, although it's too early to judge what kind of impact this will have on mobile operators and real-world performance. Capacity and revenue will still be highly restricting factors.