Half of the data traffic on US carrier Verizon Wireless is now carried on its LTE network, its CEO announced last week at CES, marking a significant increase on its October 2012 watermark, when just 35 per cent of its data traffic was LTE.

Apple’s iPhone 5, its first LTE enabled handset, was released in September 2012 and is likely to account for much of the data boost. Verizon’s CEO Lowell McAdam, said that by the end of the fourth quarter 2012, 23 per cent of its customer base were using LTE enabled phones, up from just 16 per cent at the end of the third quarter.

McAdam also revealed that of all the new postpaid contracts added in the fourth quarter, 85 per cent of these purchased LTE enabled phones.

Mike Haberman, vice president of network engineering for Verizon Wireless told Fierce Wireless that Verizon’s LTE network now has a population overage of nearly 274 million, nearly 90 per cent of its footprint  and that it expects for complete its LTE rollout by the middle of 2013, six months ahead of schedule. He also said that by 2014 plans to combine AWS spectrum with 700MHz spectrum using carrier aggregation for a speed increase.

The US and Canada currently has the largest LTE subscriber base in the word, at nearly 30 million, compared with just under 28m for the Asia Pacific region, according to the latest Informa WCIS stats.

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