Growth to be fuelled by enterprises in next few years, but consumers to take over by 2015.

LTE subscribers will reach 428 million worldwide by 2016, up from almost 11 million this year, according to a new report published by Juniper Research on Tuesday.

However, despite that significant increase, which amounts to a compound annual growth rate of almost 110%, LTE will still only account for 6% of global mobile subscriptions, the analyst firm said.

"North America, along with Western Europe, will be the most advanced region globally for LTE mobile broadband users," Nitin Bhas, research analyst at Juniper Research, told Total Telecom in an email. "The slowest growth rate is expected in Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, followed by the Indian subcontinent."

He noted that the high growth rate stems in no small part from the present low LTE subscriber base in many regions.

"In the early years, dongles and plug-in cards were the main methods of access, but from 2012 onwards smartphones and tablets (especially) and to a lesser extent embedded LTE capability [in other devices], will become much more common," he said.

Indeed, Juniper Research predicts that smartphones and tablets will account for around half of all LTE devices by 2016, with the other 50% shared between devices such as mobile routers, femtocells, portable games consoles, and cameras.

According to the report, enterprises will initially dominate the LTE market. "With LTE being offered as a premium-level service initially, enterprise subscribers will be attracted by the improved data speeds and the service guarantees that will be offered," Bhas stated in the release.

However, as vendors embed LTE into commercial devices consumer uptake will drastically increase from 2013, with subscribers seen overtaking enterprise users by 2015.

Operators will respond to this increased uptake by building additional infrastructure, with the number of LTE base stations expected to reach almost 1 million by 2014.

"North America, Western Europe and the Far East and China will account for almost 83% of the total LTE-enabled base station deployments worldwide by 2016," Bhas predicted.