Quarter over quarter subscriber increase for LTE and WiMAX was 250 percent and 12 percent, respectively, at the end of October 2011, according to the 16th issue of the 4GCounts Quarterly Report from Maravedis. At the end of Q3 2011, 35 operators had commercially launched FDD LTE.

"LTE adoption is accelerating. Maravedis anticipates that there will be 448 million LTE subscribers by 2016, of which 20 percent will be TD-LTE users," said Cintia Garza, 4GCounts Team Leader.

The region where the most TD-LTE trials have been conducted is APAC with 12 operator's trials, followed by Europe with nine 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. We now expect TD-LTE smartphones will be ready for commercial launch in early 2013," said Basharat Ashai, co-author of the report.

This quarter, NSN-Motorola and Huawei had the lion's share of awarded LTE infrastructure contracts, with 29 percent and 26 percent, respectively. Huawei, Ericsson, and Nokia Siemens are among the leading providers of LTE infrastructure for the top 50 LTE operators.