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Nadine Manjaro of ABI forecasts 34M subscribers by 2011, nearly none with voice. Verizon is even more cautious, projecting low subscriber counts until 2012, then a boom. Brough Taylor points to another reason not to expect much before 2011-2012. “If every other release has taken ~3 years from specs complete to commercial deployments, why is LTE going to be so much faster?”

The timing will be very different depending on the country. TeliaSonera, Tele2 and Telenor have announced in Scandinavia. NTT & KDDI will go quickly in Japan, although Softbank is holding back for capex reasons. MetroPCS and U.S. Cellular are joining Verizon in the U.S. They have limited spectrum and the efficiency of 4G appeals to them. China Mobile is set for 2011. 34M is a negligible fraction of mobile users and not enough to have much effect on the competitive dynamic. China is around 700M mobiles, India 400M, and while I don't have a figure handy I think the world count is soon 3B, increasing at a ferocious rate in the developing world.

WiMAX. because it's shipping, is ahead. ABI writes “The installed base of WiMAX stood at only a little over three million subscriptions, but it is a sign that the battle for the 4G market is not an automatic victory for LTE.” I'm seeing WiMAX in parts of the Middle East and Eastern Europe, although I think they are mostly pulling customers new to broadband and not switchers.

Wireless conversion in broadband is crucial to any projections, with estimates around everywhere from 5% to 40% over the next 5 - 7 years. I've been very skeptical until recently, but now am collecting datapoints that suggest conversion rates will be substantial. Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent, and Ericsson are winning most of the LTE contracts announced.