LTE RAN Infrastructure Market on Upswing

LTE Base Station Market to Reach $13 Billion in Sales by 2016

Maravedis Research :

MONTREAL, Canada, June 7, 2011

- As LTE contract awards, deployments and subscriber base growth accelerate, all RAN vendors are poised for growth in the 4G market according to the latest issue of the 4Ggear™ Quarterly Report from Maravedis. "Benefitting from a generally more positive environment in 2010 and 2011 than in 2009, our research found that all infrastructure vendors are getting a piece of the LTE pie," commented lead author Fernando Donoso, Senior Analyst. "However, Ericsson above all has gained a head start in real-world LTE deployment and operations expertise, thanks to their position in Verizon's and MetroPCS' LTE networks - the only truly commercial-scale networks worldwide" he continued.

Everything is not rosy for the Swedish vendor. Maravedis' in-depth analysis of Huawei and Nokia-Siemens networks showed that both have the potential to challenge the world number 1 wireless infrastructure vendor in LTE, thanks to their advanced base station architectures, increasingly sophisticated end-to-end solutions, and the impressive number of LTE contracts both companies have succeeded in accumulating. Additional Research Findings: Maravedis forecasts that the worldwide LTE market will rise from approximately $1.5 billion USD in 2011, to over $13 billion in 2016, including both FDD and TDD equipment. LTE shipments so far have consisted 100% of macro cell base stations. All major RAN vendors have introduced distributed macro base stations using centralized baseband processing - so-called baseband farms. Maravedis expects commercial small cell base station deployments to begin in 2012.

"We see distributed macro base stations and pico cells bringing the vision of heterogeneous networks into reality in 2012" added Adlane Fellah, Research Director. "But operators may allocate common budgets for all small cell deployments, regardless of technology, so the competition between pico cells, femto cells, and carrier Wi-Fi is likely to become fierce."