IDC Asia-Pacific is expecting high-speed packet access (HSPA) technology connections to hit 43.6 million in the Asia-Pacific region by the end of the year.

With a strong growth in both handsets and dongle form factors, “the success of HSPA and the continuous demand for more bandwidth is accelerating the need for long-term evolution (LTE) deployments in most of the HSPA deployed markets in the region,” according to Bill Rojas, research director for IDC’s Asia-Pacific Telecommunications Research.

The phenomenal growth of HSPA connections has come at the price of explosive consumption in bandwidth, forcing HSPA operators to either offload as much traffic as possible through WiFi access points, halt the number of new HSPA dongle customers or capping the maximum downloadable GBytes per month per user, says Rojas.

LTE is being promoted by the industry as the all-IP migration path for UMTS and EV-DO operators to prepare them for IMT-2000 Advanced or 4G.
IDC expects a select group of 3G operators, possibly DoCoMo, KDDI, eMobile, Hong Kong CSL, PCCW/HGC's joint venture, Telecom New Zealand and China Mobile Hong Kong to pioneer investment in LTE.

"The current propaganda of LTE infrastructure is being concentrated on developed APEJ markets, where converged handsets with HSPA and WiFi are becoming the new dominant end-user mobile device, but this attention is not addressing another huge opportunity in APEJ, which is the pent-up demand of under-served broadband households," Bill adds.

IDC estimates that in markets like the Philippines, the realistic addressable market could be as high or even higher than one-third of all households.
By the end of 2009, IDC forecasts that India's broadband household penetration will be less than 1.6%, while its mobile penetration will reach 38% or 439 million subscribers.

"IDC also foresees that most of the Asia-Pacific markets excluding Japan will need to move to an all-IP 4G infrastructure, but uncertainty still lingers on what are the best paths for GSM operators that do not have 3G spectrum today,” says Rojas.

IDC believes there will be a complementary role for both WiMAX and LTE in the region.

Each technology can address a different segment of the market on different spectrum bands, which when combined will lead to an exciting future.

For instance, India's broadband household penetration could exceed 20%, making India along with China the largest markets for residential broadband in the world.

China has an advantage in that it has invested heavily in Carrier Ethernet technology to deploy substantial numbers of xDSL lines in use.

"LTE and other OFDM systems such as 802.16m have a very important role to play across all parts of APEJ, and all eyes will be on the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) technology choices for IMT-2000 Advanced,” says Rojas.

“It is early to predict what the ITU will decide but one thing remains fairly certain and that is that OFDMA systems such as LTE will be the workhorse of mobile broadband in the next decade," Rojas concludes.