According to the new Ericsson Mobility Report, LTE will account for some 10 percent (approximately 90 million) of all mobile subscriptions in Latin America by 2018. Company says that 14 million new mobile subscriptions were recorded in Q3 for a total of 676 million and estimates that another 230 million mobile subscriptions will be added by 2018.

LTE is currently being rolled out across the region and Ericsson has won many of the contracts for the new networks. Ericsson has signed LTE/EPC contracts with Claro, Oi, Telefónica | Vivo and TIM in Brazil; UNE in Colombia; Telcel in Mexico; and AT&T and Open Mobile in Puerto Rico. Ericsson claims that company will have a more than 50 percent share of the Latin American LTE market in terms of volume, once they have been deployed.

In Latin America as a whole, Ericsson predicts that 3G technologies such as WCDMA/HSPA will largely replace 2G technologies such as GSM/EDGE by 2018. Whereas 3G technologies currently account for just 18 percent of all mobile subscriptions, they will account for 65 percent of subscriptions by 2018. 2G technologies will decline from 82 percent of all mobile subscriptions at present to 25 percent by 2018.