Light Reading's 2012 Mobile Life Survey is full of small surprises, especially since most of the survey respondents make their living in the telecom business.
I tried to see if iPhone users in our survey were likely to own a Long Term Evolution (LTE) device already or if they had plans to buy one soon.
Nearly 80 percent of the folks who say they are iPhone users (they identified their smartphone OS as Apple's iOS) do not currently own an LTE device.
About 68 percent of that same group (iPhone owners who own no LTE devices now) say they have no plans to purchase an LTE-powered device this year.
Android users, the other big group of mobile users in our survey, weren't all that different. Seventy-four percent of the Android users we surveyed say they do not own an LTE-powered device.
About 66 percent of the Android users that took our survey and do not currently own an LTE device say they have no plans to purchase an LTE-powered device this year.
For some reason I thought the Android users would have a stronger intent to purchase something LTE-related. I'm not sure why I thought that, but they weren't that much more likely to buy anything LTE as the iPhone users we surveyed.
So, most folks surveyed who aren't LTE device owners aren't looking to change that in the near future. What could the industry do to change that? Should those intentions be viewed as pessimistic, or should we assume that these numbers mean nothing but upside for LTE device makers?
— Phil Harvey, Editor-in-Chief, Light Reading
