LTE North America 2012

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Dallas
Fairmont Dallas Hotel
November 14 -15, 2012

Attendance: 1,000+
Exhibitors: 50
Media and analysts: approx.30

Calysto Overview

The LTE North America conference was held in Dallas for 2012 and once again drew strong interest from the mobile carrier community, perhaps reflecting overall growth of LTE in the United States. Mike Roberts, Principal Analyst of Americas at Informa Telecoms & Media, producers of the event, commented: “North America is the world’s dominant LTE market and will continue to see explosive growth with subscriptions forecast to boom six-fold from 26 million at end-2012 to 162 million by end-2017.”

Organizers reported the event drew 60 unique carriers representing some 40 per cent of the U.S. carrier market, with small local rural players such as the Texas-based ZIPnet U.S., to regional’s such as MetroPCS, as well as AT&T and Verizon. In addition, overall attendance at the event which moved to Dallas this year saw a 66 percent growth over 2011, with more than 1,000 attendees reported by organizer Informa Telecoms.

While discussions last year focused on the first LTE deployments and early feedback from an emerging technology, this year’s talks centered around opportunities that LTE has enabled and challenges facing the technology, as well as VoLTE, Small Cells, and LTE-Advanced. The conference agenda included a VoLTE track, which proved so popular among delegates that Informa plans to launch a new event next year: LTE Voice Summit 2013.

During the program, 150 speakers presented across the three days including CxOs from North America’s leading carriers. Keynotes were delivered by John Saw, CTO of Clearwire and Krish Prabhu, CTO of AT&T. A keynote panel discussion featured Google, AT&T, MetroPCS, and Sony Mobile.

The exhibition area was modest, but traffic was reportedly good, with approximately 50 companies in the LTE space present, including Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Oracle, Panasonic, Sybase 365, and Vodafone.

New this year was an analyst clinic, which took place on the exhibition floor during the lunch and afternoon networking breaks of Day 2. Companies could register for a free one-on-one consultancy-type sessions with analysts in the mobile broadband area. The event was deemed a success and organizers are planning on having this feature at all of their events next year.

As for media, approximately 30 attended, including RCR Wireless and bnetTV. The event hash tag was #LTENA, but didn’t generate a great deal of activity from what we could see.

Summary

This was the fifth year for this LTE North America event and it continues to provide good networking opportunities for carriers, as well as worthwhile speaking opportunities.

Next

LTE North America 2013, November 20 – 21, 2013 Dallas, Texas; LTE Latin America 2013, on April 16-17, 2013.

Articles of Interest:

2012 LTE North America by RCR Wireless News – RCRTV

LTE N.A. 2012: Small cells, LTE-Advanced dominate conference

RCR Wireless

LTE North America Conference Day Two: Why spectrum is the new black

LTE North America: Day One Round-up: Standing room only

LTE World Series Blog

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