By Telecom Lead Team:
Wireless equipment major Ericsson is leading the market
due to its LTE standards contributions, according to ABI Research.
From 2005 until 1H 2011, Ericsson has made the most
approved contributions to the LTE RAN standard. This is one of several reasons
why Ericsson is a leader in LTE,” said Philip Solis, research director, mobile
devices at ABI Research.
An ABI Research analyst at the Mobile World Congress
said that Ericsson played the standards game for a winning hand
in LTE. They are neither the first nor the last to play that game.
Nokia and Nokia Siemens Networks together had the second
highest number of contributions, according to an analysis of LTE contributions
to the 3GPP RAN1 to 3GPP RAN3 standards, ABI said.
Chinese telecom gear maker Huawei came third and was the
leading contributor in 2010 and the first half of 2011, ABI said.
Interestingly, NPD In-Stat recently said Huawei took the lead in European base
station sales last year.
The analyst noted that among the top 15 contributors,
nine were from Asia-Pacific, four were from Europe (Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson,
Nokia/NSN, and Vodafone), and only two were from North America (Motorola and
Qualcomm). Of the nine from Asia Pacific, three are based in China (CATT,
Huawei, and ZTE), three in Japan (NEC, NTT DoCoMo, and Panasonic), two in South
Korea (LG Electronics and Samsung), and one in Taiwan (HTC).
Solis also noted that companies’ contributions are indirectly
related to patents, but are still a means of detecting which companies are
pushing their intellectual property into the standard.
According to ABI’s analysis of LTE-specific
contributions, the top two had nearly one third of all contributions, and the
top seven had nearly three-quarters of the total.
It is interesting to see how some of the European and
American companies have held leading positions in the shift from 3G to 4G and
many Asia-Pacific companies – especially in China, Japan, and South Korea
make up a large portion of the top fifteen contributors,” Solis added
Recently, Mobile
service provider Saudi Telecom Company selected Ericsson to deploy LTE network
in Saudi Arabia.
editor@telecomlead.com
Please
see the complete coverage of Mobile World Congress here
