How does AT&T, Verizon, Sprint & T-Mobile make a business of selling expensive 4G and LTE mobile data plans when WiFi is free?  I constantly structure trying to understand the consumer value of having an expensive high speed paid connection anywhere but in the car.  WiFi hotspots are growing 25X faster than cell phone towers and now outnumber them Worldwide by far.  So when you think about signing up for that expensive data plan with caps you might want to think about how to become more resourceful as a consumer and look to use more free wireless access at similar speeds.  You might want to learn how to use an Pad without a data plan.  

I think the financial media and the wireless industry analysts have wildly over projected and overlooking a major trend that could derail the 4G / LTE train.  Here are three industry "expert" forecasts below which wildly assume there is no competition and no alternatives to 4G, Wimax & LTE:

Infonetics: "Forecasts the worldwide LTE infrastructure market to grow approximately 10 times from 2010 to 2014, to $11.5 billion. The firm, citing tremendous growth coming from smartphones and tablets, also increased its subscriber forecast from previous estimations. It anticipates close to 165 million worldwide LTE subscribers by 2014."

Juniper: "It took nearly six years for 3G mobile services based on UMTS/HSPA to reach 100 million subscribers but it will take LTE just four years to reach the same milestone, say researchers at Juniper Research. The number of LTE subscriptions worldwide will grow at a cumulative average growth rate of 404 percent from 2010 to 2014 and reach 136 million subscriptions by year-end 2014, Juniper forecasts."

Coda Research: "A new study forecasts that European users will lead the charge into LTE with a compound annual growth rate of more than 50 percent. This latest report from Coda Research states that, by 2013, North America will have 7 million LTE users, Asia/Pacific 13 million and Europe 15 million. However, Europe will be overtaken by Asia/Pacific in 2016, with the Chinese becoming dominant users in the region."