LTE Drives the News but WCDMA Drives Base Station Deployments

Despite a poor worldwide economy, demand for smartphones, regular phones, and wireless broadband services continues to drive the base station market, according to In-Stat.

The number of newly deployed macro cellular base stations will grow over 10% in 2009.

Of new macro cellular base station shipments, WCDMA base station shipments will make up the lion's share of all base station shipments worldwide, accounting for about 50% of the total base station revenue. By 2013, In-Stat forecasts that the percent that WCDMA contributes to total base station revenue will exceed 70% and LTE base stations will account for another 20% of the total.

"WCDMA/HSPA base stations will be the work horses of wireless data networks," says Allen Nogee, In-Stat analyst. "Many operators, worldwide, are in the process of rolling out, or enhancing, their current CDMA networks, including a very large rollout of CDMA by China Unicom. China Unicom was awarded the WCDMA contract to provide services in China. WCDMA will gain the most subscribers, with CDMA2000 and TD-SCDMA taking the distant second and third positions."

Recent research by In-Stat found the following:

From 2008 to 2013, total base station revenue is forecast to decrease by almost 3% CAGR. Not only do base stations continue to drop in price, but also the mix of base stations is changing in favor of smaller base stations and LTE base stations.
While there is no growth for GSM in areas that are transitioning to WCDMA, there is growth of GSM subscribers in Africa, India, China, and Latin and South America.
TD-SCDMA base station technology is demonstrating the fastest growth.
LTE is rolling out! The majority of the committed operators have roll-outs scheduled for 2012 and 2013. In the US, Verizon is in the process of deploying LTE with Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent equipment, Alcatel-Lucent supplies most of their existing CDMA equipment.