Telecom Lead India: Mobile Capex is likely to grow 9
percent to $111 billion in 2012, supported by investment in radio access
network (RAN) infrastructure and in-building wireless access.
The Asia-Pacific telecom market will bring a large
proportion of the increased capital expenditure year-on-year.
China Mobile is spending 57 percent of in annual CAPEX on
radio network infrastructure, followed by 18 percent on its transmission and
backbone network.
China Mobile has deployed 900 TD-LTE base-stations in six
cities as part of the trial but plans to have 200,000 BTS by 2013.
In fact, global capital expenditure weakened in Q4 2011.
Many mobile operators trimmed their budgets for the remainder of 2011.
In the first half of 2012 operators start to switch over
from LTE trial to commercial service in a number of markets.
Operators have been reviewing their macro RAN
architectures and are increasing their rooftop and street-level small cells as
well as distributed base station antenna deployments to handle the data
traffic.
Capex of the North American market will soften 1.3
percent over the year.
AT&T is adding capacity to its network and expanding
backhaul.
Sprint allocates 86 percent of its CAPEX to investment in
data capacity increases and overhauling its legacy network of base stations for
multi-mode equipment.
Verizon is proving to be no slouch with investments in
its fiber-optic network, 4G LTE coverage, global IP and cloud-based services.
European CAPEX has been on the back foot relative to
North America and Asia-Pacific due to weak macroeconomic factors and regulatory
issues, however by 2013 we expect to start to seeing some of the European CAPEX
come back as LTE upgrades roll on Europe wide,” said Aditya Kaul, practice
director, mobile networks, ABI Research.
