Dell’Oro: LTE RAN Revenues Approach $22 Billion by 2018

The Mobile Radio Access Network (RAN) LTE equipment market for both macro and small cell radios will witness tremendous growth over the next five years, with LTE RAN revenue levels expected to outdo the RAN revenue peaks of GSM in 2007 and WCDMA in 2011, according to a new 5-Year Forecast Report from Dell’Oro Group.

Some highlights:

• Total RAN market—macro and small cell—to grow for a second consecutive year in 2014 and decline at a low single-digit CAGR between 2014 and 2018.
• Macro investments to remain strong throughout the forecast period with more than 1 M macro (RRU, antenna integrated radio, active antenna system) radios shipping in 2018 configured using both distributed and centralized baseband architectures.
• LTE-TDD to account for nearly 40% of LTE RF carrier shipments in the forecast period.
• The top 4 vendors in the LTE RAN market on a revenue basis in the first quarter 2014 were Ericsson, Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent, and Nokia.

“The momentum around LTE coverage build-outs and subscriber adoption is stronger than anything we have experienced with previous mobile technologies,” said Stefan Pongratz, Analyst of Dell’Oro Groups RAN and Small Cell Programs. “The pace of the LTE radio deployments during the coverage phase and the variety of band combinations available for LTE is enabling service providers to deploy radios in multiple bands optimized for coverage and capacity. This is driving investments to remain high even after the initial LTE coverage phase,” continued Pongratz.

http://www.delloro.com/news/lte-ran-revenues-to-approach-22-b-by-2018