Infonetics Research Focuses on LTE Equipment Market

Focusing on the mobile and wireless equipment markets, including vendor market share, forecasts, and LTE and WIMAX deployments, Infonetics Research has released excerpts from its first quarter 2011 (1Q11) 2G/3G/4G (LTE and WiMAX) Infrastructure and Subscribers report.

Investment continues, particularly 2G/3G network modernization in Western Europe, CDMA upgrades in North America, and 2G/EDGE capacity upgrades in Asia, while the overall mobile infrastructure market is down sequentially, the company stated. During the 5 years from 2011 to 2015, Infonetics forecasts service providers will spend a cumulative $245 billion worldwide on mobile infrastructure, the company stated in a press release.

The report offers worldwide and regional market size, vendor market share, analysis, and forecasts through 2015 for many categories of 2G and 3G mobile equipment, LTE equipment, WiMAX equipment and mobile subscribers.

“The first quarter of 2011 developed as we anticipated, with the global 2G/3G/4G infrastructure market declining 13.8 percent sequentially on the heels of a very strong fourth quarter; the market is up 14.4 percent year-over-year (from the first quarter of 2010), setting the foundation for the new investment cycle that we expect to last through 2014,” predicted Stéphane Téral, Infonetics Research's principal analyst for mobile infrastructure.

The only segment posting both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year gains in the 2G/3G market in 1Q11 is packet core infrastructure, which offered up 0.7 percent and 41 percent, respectively, reflecting ongoing 3G expansion activity tied to 2G modernization, the report claimed. Each now about a half billion dollar market globally, LTE (Long Term Evolution) equipment caught up to WiMAX equipment in 1Q11. The report forecasts the number of LTE subscribers to top 290 million by 2015.

Recently, the company released another report where it stated that VoIP gateway market is waning. In its first quarter 2011 Enterprise Unified Communication, VoIP and TDM Equipment report, the company focused on preliminary market share results. The research was led by VoIP and IMS analyst Diane Myers. According to the preliminary report, the enterprise telephony and unified communications (UC) equipment market, which is made up of VoIP gateways.

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Raju Shanbhag is a contributing editor for virtual-pbx. To read more of Raju’s articles, please visit his columnist page.

Edited by Jennifer Russell