Crown Castle on U.S. carrier investment
Speaking at the Raymond James 35th Annual Institutional Investors Conference, Crown Castle CEO Ben Moreland was optimistic about the prospects for continued carrier investment in wireless networks. “What’s important in our business, and one of the first things I look at, notwithstanding the competitive nature of the big four carriers out there today, is the ability for them to each make an incremental dollar of capital investment and drive an incremental dollar of revenue,” he said “And whether you go from sort of the market leader at the AT&T/Verizon level to the highly competitive, more challenging companies at the Sprint/T-Mobile level … Even in T-Mobile’s most recent results you can see that incremental yield on that incremental dollar spent very clearly and that’s extremely good for our business.”
Moreland also emphasized the health of the U.S. wireless market in comparison to others. While other countries may outpace the United States in the rate of smartphone adoption or growth in data consumption, the United States continues to be a leader in infrastructure investment and in wireless service revenue. “Last year there was almost $190 billion of wireless service revenue in the U.S. market, that’s six-times Brazil for example. Thirty-four billion dollars of capex spent in the U.S. market –
that’s many, many multiples of any other market we could likely invest in,” he said. Moreland describes the U.S. market as “the largest and fastest-growing market in the world really for wireless.”
ABI Research on small cells and Wi-Fi
ABI Research has ranked infrastructure vendors according to their perceived levels of innovation and implementation in small cells and carrier Wi-Fi. Alcatel-Lucent ranked highest, with an almost perfect score in both innovation and implementation. Huawei was not far behind.
“Alcatel-Lucent has managed to secure the largest number of publicized small cells contracts with top tier-1 operators while Huawei has the highest global reach in terms of small cells with significant presence in all regions,” said ABI. On the innovation scale, Huawei was outranked by NSN, NEC and Cisco, but all had fewer implementations than Huawei. Of these three, Cisco came closest to Huawei and Alcatel-Lucent in terms of implementations.
Ericsson is perhaps the sleeping giant that has yet to make its presence fully felt in small cells and carrier-grade Wi-Fi. The company ranked below all others on the innovation scale and below Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei and Cisco in implementation. But Ericsson clearly intends to be a major force. The company bought BelAir Networks to add Wi-Fi to its portfolio, and recently introduced its Radio Dot small cell solution.
