Several recent research reports assess trends in the small cell and HetNet space, as well as recognizing the growth of TD-LTE in the global wireless market.
ABI assessed vendors in the small cell market and carrier Wi-Fi market and put Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei and Cisco at the top overall. ALU won top marks in innovation and implementation as well, with NSN and NEC gaining recognition in innovation due to their portfolios and available features and Huawei and Ericsson scoring points in implementation along with ALU due to deployment numbers.
“The small cells market is very competitive now with the increasing demand for LTE, Carrier Wi-Fi, and enterprise femtocells,” said Ahmed Ali, ABI research analyst. “Vendors need to start pushing the envelope in order to differentiate themselves and consider other major areas for growth such as value-added services and small cells wireless backhaul.”
ABI also recently said that it sees potential in the indoor location space beyond retail — for enterprise, corporate and public venues, where small cell and Wi-Fi will also help drive the market. The company said it expects to see more than 40,000 installations of indoor location technologies by 2019.
“New technologies will give this market a major jolt in the arm; Quuppa’s BLE technology and advances in Wi-Fi and small cell location will all better enable low-cost and high-accuracy across large buildings,” said Dominique Bonte, practice director for ABI. ” IoE, wearables, and BYOD means there will be many more ways of tracking in the future, while the onset of low-cost BLE tags makes accurate asset tracking cost effective for all verticals, even consumers.”
TechNavio’s analysts recently forecast a compound annual growth rate of nearly 200% for the global Wi-Fi-enabled small cell market between 2013-2018.
Meanwhile, Dell’Oro Group reported rapid growth in the TD-LTE radio access network (RAN) market during the fourth quarter of 2013, mostly due to action in the Chinese market. Dell’Oro says that growth in China is expected to continue to offset declining RAN revenues in North America during 2014, leading to low single-digit growth.
“The initial large scale TD-LTE rollouts in China were the largest contributor to both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year growth in the overall RAN market,” said Stefan Pongratz, who is a RAN and small cell analyst with Dell’Oro Group. “We estimate TD-LTE RAN revenues exceeded $1 billio,n accounting for more than one-third of total FDD/TDD LTE revenues during the fourth quarter 2013.”
Dell’Oro’s quarterly report on the mobile RAN said that ZTE recorded the largest sequential LTE revenue share gains. Ericsson had 38% of WCDMA/LTE RAN revenues for 2013, followed by Huawei with 24%, NSN with 17% and Alcatel-Lucent with 10%, according to the research firm.
