LTE technology, the WiMAX competitor and 4G network that carriers such as Verizon, China Mobile, and Vodafone have hitched their wireless star to, isn't expected to be widely available until 2010 at the earliest, but tech research experts are already predicting it to be a huge hit with subscribers. The ABI Research Institute is estimating that 32 million people will be subscribed to LTE service with one of the carriers by 2013 - just a few short years after it becomes commercially available.

The majority of those future subscribers will likely hail from Asia, mainly because they don't currently have much in the way of 3G technology. With their lack of 3G services, it seems to make sense that carriers would opt to forgo all the research, development, and implementation that equipping the area with 3G would entail in favor of waiting just a couple years to get a 4G system rolling. The rest of the 32 million subscribers are expected to be split between North America and Western Europe.

It's interesting that ABI is expressing such lofty confidence in the market share potential of LTE. I'd like to see their thoughts and predictions regarding Sprint's (and others') future WiMAX services and predict the popularity of that side of the technology.