Communications and Technology Industry Research

As the overall deployment of Long Term Evolution or ‘LTE’ deployment is increasing worldwide, the size of the LTE Base Station market is also increasing accordingly.

ABI Research (News - Alert), a research firm that offers insight upon new trends in global connectivity and other emerging technologies, has announced that in its latest study on the Long Term Evolution or LTE Base Station markets for the year 2012, Nokia Siemens (News - Alert) Networks has grabbed the top position. Titled ‘LTE Base Station Vendor Matrix,’ the new research report keeps Huawei (News - Alert) at the second and Ericsson at the third spot in this global analysis of LTE base station vendors, which aims at gauging how the vendors offering LTE base stations to wireless radio access networks have been faring.

Within the study, it was found that Nokia (News - Alert) Siemens Networks has consistently been grabbing multiple commercial contracts and has also been offering its support to essential IP for LTE apart from increasing its operations in small cells as well, which has helped it grab the top rank.

“Nokia Siemens Networks (News - Alert) was number one in our implementation score on the back of their impressive number of LTE/RAN contract wins and they were also number one in our score for innovation thanks to the extension of their Liquid Radio roadmap to now encompass Flexi Zone,” commented Nick Marshall, principal analyst, Networks at ABI Research. “Ericsson and Huawei were a very close number two and number three in our innovation and implementation scores thanks to their contributions to essential IP for LTE and continued market share gains, and compared to our previous vendor matrix we believe Huawei and Ericsson are closing the gap on Nokia Siemens Networks,” added Marshall.

ABI Research has brought an analytical tool named vendor matrix to define the relative positions of vendors in the market on the basis of a number of factors. For the current study, the research firm utilized the parameters named ‘innovation’ and ‘implementation’ to assess these vendors through the vendor matrix. The new ‘LTE Base Station Vendor Matrix’ study report by ABI Research features a chart that displays the rankings of the top ten firms in this vendor matrix.

Recently this month, ABI Research announced in its new report that changing cellular network paradigms are driving a shift in the architecture of base stations from traditional macrocells to distributed base stations and toward the growing use of small cell base stations. The group said the primary drivers for this transition are the increasing data traffic demand and the OPEX and CAPEX cost savings inherent in deploying small cell equipment.