As nations across the world increase their investment in super-fast mobile broadband networks, new figures indicate that spending on Long-Term Evolution (LTE) base stations will surge this year.

According to technology market intelligence firm ABI Research, the global outlay on these base stations will hit .3 billion (£8.1 billion) by the end of 2013, up by 82.4 per cent on 2012.

The launch of LTE has helped to reduce the decline in Western European expenditure on radio access networks (RANs) seen last year and will do the same in Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Middle East this year, ABI predicted.

Ying Kang Tan, research associate at ABI Research, noted that there are subtle variations in the type of capital expenditure incurred in different regions, with operators in developed markets planning to upgrade their networks to LTE-Advanced before the end of the year.

"Going forward, amidst skyrocketing data traffic, they will also invest a larger proportion of their RAN spend on LTE small cells," he added.

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