WCDMA Leads in the Base Station Market

According to a recently published report from In-Stat, even if the worldwide economical climate has been a harsh one lately, the market of base stations has been on the rise due to an increase in demand for smartphones, regular phones, and wireless broadband services. According to the research firm, the total number of newly deployed macro cellular base stations is expected to register a growth of around 10 percent during the ongoing year.

At the same time, the research firm's report also shows that the largest amount of new macro cellular base stations shipped is represented by WCDMA solutions. On a global scale, these base stations are expected to account for 50 percent of the total base station revenues. Moreover, the percentage is on the rise, In-Stat notes, forecasting that the WCDMA base station shipments will reach revenue in excess of 70 percent of the total revenues in the market by 2013, while LTE base stations will only account for 20 percent of the total revenue.

“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.”

In-Stat also released the findings of a recently conducted research, and showed that the total revenue from base stations is expected to decrease by 3 percent CAGR from 2008 to 2013. “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,” the research firm notes.

Other findings of the report further include:
- 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.

Additional details on the findings can be found on the research firm's website.