Fixed Mobile Convergence

Infonetics Research, a market research and consulting firm, recently released the first quarter (Q109) edition of its “Mobile Infrastructure and Subscribers” report, which indicated that W-CDMA vendor revenue increased by 8 percent between Q408 and Q109, and is up by 61 percent year-over-year.

Few technologies tracked in Infonetic’s mobile infrastructure report include GSM, W-CDMA, CDMA, CDMA2000, TD-SCDMA, and microcell/picocell.

Stéphane Téral, principal analyst for mobile and FMC infrastructure, said, "The mobile infrastructure market was marked in the first quarter of 2009 by steep declines across the board except for W-CDMA and packet core equipment, strong 3G rollouts in China, and a major vendor shakeout. Between China Mobile, China Unicom (News - Alert), and China Telecom, a total of 59,000 3G base transceiver stations (BTS) were deployed in China alone in 1Q09, helping Huawei and ZTE gain significant share at the expense of most of the other major players in the RAN equipment market. Huawei is now the size of Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) in this segment, and ZTE doubled its RAN revenue market share over just the last 4 quarters, solidifying its spot on the top 5 vendor leaderboard."

According to the report, the year-over-year increase of W-CDMA vendor revenue was mainly due to China's 3G rollouts and smartphone- and data card-driven upgrades in North America and Europe. Despite economic slowdown, mobile packet core and mobile softswitching (soft MSC (News - Alert) and wireless media gateway) deployments continue to surge and are in brighter side of mobile infrastructure market. This was driven by migration to IP networks.

However, the report indicated that the global home location register (HLR) revenue dropped by 21 percent in first quarter of 2009.

The report indicates that mobile subscriber continues to grow, led by China and India. It is indicated that more than 100 million new mobile subscribers are added per year. In this regard, Africa is now a contributor as well.

Few companies tracked in Infonetic’s mobile infrastructure report include Alcatel-Lucent, Apertio, Cisco, Ericsson, GENBAND, HP, Huawei, Motorola, Nokia Siemens, Nortel (News - Alert), Starent, ZTE, and others. Among these companies, Ericsson has increased its revenue market share in first-uarter of 2009, retaining its position for macrocell RAN equipment.

Infonetics' mobile infrastructure and subscribers report offers global as well as regional market size, market share, analysis, and forecasts through 2013 for -- RAN equipment, mobile switching subsystem equipment by technology (mobile switching center, soft MSCs, wireless media gateways), mobile packet core network equipment (GPRS gateway support nodes, serving GPRS support nodes, packet data serving nodes), HLR equipment, and mobile subscribers by technology.