Business is booming for wireless infrastructure vendors.
Base station installations market will grow 14 percent in 2011.
There are a number of factors contributing to the
increase in base station shipments, but two countries in particular are
significant to growth.
Operators in China will more than double their number of
3G subscribers by the end of 2011, with low-cost smartphones becoming popular there.
US operators are investing large amounts of CAPEX in 4G.
Reports indicate that Verizon has installed or upgraded 20,000 to 30,000 base
stations over the past 16 months, AT&T is starting to launch LTE services
in major cities around the country, and Sprint’s Network Vision will see most
of their existing infrastructure replaced by multi-mode base stations that can
support 2G, 3G, and 4G simultaneously.
The major motivation for mobile operators to expand their
networks comes from the continuing growth in mobile broadband data traffic,
driven by increasing penetration of smartphones and, to a lesser extent,
tablets.
Existing networks are struggling to cope with the surge
in data traffic, so operators are forced to increase capacity,” said Jim Eller,
principal analyst for wireless infrastructure, ABI Research.
However, operators are finding new revenue opportunities
with mobile data, which more than compensate for decreasing voice revenues, so
they are expecting good returns on this investment,” Eller added.
Moving 2G subscribers to 3G, and 3G to 4G, results in
more efficiencies for operators and allows operators to offer more data
services.
By Telecomlead.com Team
editor@telecomlead.com
