Ericsson and Huawei share the LTE infrastructure market share lead in Q2 2015, each claiming just over 20 percent, according to IHS.
This indicates that Nokia Networks, Alcatel-Lucent, Samsung and ZTE could not reach the top of the LTE 4G infrastructure market.
Interestingly, ZTE had 17.9 percent LTE infrastructure market share in 2013, said HIS
ALSO READ: ZTE achieves 18% LTE infrastructure market share in 2013, says IHS
Ericsson claims that it is the market leader in LTE network technology. Ericsson is serving 40 percent of the world’s LTE smartphone traffic currently.
Fuelled by 3G network expansion, the global macrocell mobile infrastructure market grew 2 percent year on year and quarter on quarter to $11.4 billion in Q2.
The report said there was strong 3G W-CDMA capacity projects in EMEA and unabated LTE activity in China.
“W-CDMA alone pulled the 2G/3G market out of the dumps and contributed to the growth of the whole mobile infrastructure market. Substantial 3G deployments took place in Brazil, India, the Middle East, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam,” said Stephane Teral, research director for mobile infrastructure and carrier economics at IHS.
Telecom operators in Brazil kicked off a massive 2G GSM to 3G W-CDMA migration. Thailand has ordered mobile operators to shut down their GSM network to re-use the spectrum for LTE.
There is some bad news for LTE infrastructure vendors. The growth in LTE infrastructure revenue was essentially flat (+1 percent) in Q2 2015 from Q1 2015, but grew 10 percent from the year-ago 2nd quarter, according to the IHS Infonetics Mobile Infrastructure Equipment report from HIS.
LTE will peak at $23 billion in 2015 and then start to decline as a result of diminishing rollouts worldwide.
Telecom operators have launched 422 commercial LTE networks as of July 2015, 363 of which are of the FDD (frequency division duplex) variety.
Mobile infrastructure software will grow at a 5-year (2014-2019) compound annual growth rate of 8 percent, said IHS.
Baburajan K
editor@telecomlead.com
