Telecom equipment vendors Huawei, Ericsson, Cisco and NSN are leading the overall Wireless Packet Core market in the third quarter of 2013, said Dell’Oro Group.
Dell’Oro Group in a telecom analysis report said the overall Wireless Packet Core market grew more than 17 percent during the third quarter of 2013 versus the year-ago period.
In the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) segment, Alcatel-Lucent joined Ericsson and Huawei in the top three vendor list.
Regions outside the North American LTE market are now driving EPC results, allowing a larger set of vendors to compete in the worldwide market. We expect EPC spending to accelerate in Europe and in China in coming quarters.
New Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technology furnished by leading vendors is now being trialed by operators. Dell’Oro Group said it expects that in 2014 and beyond, operators will begin deploying NFV EPC systems.
Additional services are being added along with EPC core networks, including Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and Rich Communication Services (RCS). These new systems will create additional vendor decisions for Service Providers as their networks are enhanced.
Chris DePuy, vice president of Wireless Packet Core Research at Dell’Oro Group, said that network function virtualization (NFV) means vendors can sell software-only telecom core network systems. These new systems will run on top of data center-class servers, effectively matching the features and performance of systems that were previously available as hardware-based systems.
