hones-vs-dongles.html): The average data consumed by dongles grew only by 10% year over year, whereas data consumed by smartphones saw a 100% increase. The ratio of dongles to smartphones changed from roughly 80:20 to 65:35 by the end of the year. Vodacom had a total of 1.1 million dongles and 4.1 million active smartphone subscribers by the end of the year. Smartphones are definitely going to continue to grow over dongles, but they will still be affected by price and data plans support provided by operators. Further studies in consumer behavior and sentiment (http://www.marketingmagazine.co.uk/ article/1054529/research-charts-death-dongle-smartphone), give credence to dongles being preferred by business savvy subscribers only. In this survey made in the United Kingdom in 2011, the number of respondents who preferred a dongle fell drastically from 20% in the previous year to 7%. At the same time, smartphone penetration keeps increasing, with 35% owning a smartphone in 2009, and doubled the same amount in the previous year. Also, 60% of the respondents indicate that they would be buying a smartphone. Trends in Data VS. Voice Usage Initial LTE networks were deployed with data-only plans and used existing 2G or 3G networks for voice support. Currently though, VoLTE has been specified and also implemented by many vendors as part of their solutions. It is interesting to note that with additional smartphones getting introduced into the market, the usage of traditional voice keeps coming down in comparison to data usage in same periods. One study of Finnish iPhone users shows data over a 10-month period in 2011-2012 (http://www.forbes.com/sites/terokuittinen/2012/10/15/ as-iphone-mobile-data-usage-soars-voice-calls-dive/), where data usage has seen a spike of over 68% per subscriber, as shown in Figure 3-1. Average data MB per subscription per month 2,000 1,500 1,000 Figure 3-1. Average date per month CHAPTER 3 DEPLOYMENT CHALLENGES IN EVOLVING 4G Also, in the same period the average voice minutes per subscriber dropped