BTS Forecasts

Overview:

The global market for mobile base stations continues to grow apace, and is expected to show continued growth out to 2016, notwithstanding the recent drive to adopt new small-cell architectures. However, revenues from legacy technologies such as GSM and GPRS/EDGE are either already in decline or will start to decline during the forecast period, largely at the expense of growth in WCDMA/HSPA and LTE.

Developing market growth will be a significant factor during the forecast period, with the major emerging markets such as China and India seeing some of the highest levels of growth, both in terms of shipments and in the size of their installed base. At the same time, some of the more mature markets will see shipments starting to level off.

Inputs to the forecasts are derived from Informa’s comprehensive data sources and incorporate future network requirements in terms of BTS upgrades, replacements and new build. The forecasts also take account of a number of key trends that are having an impact on the BTS infrastructure market. As well as the growing move towards the displacement of legacy technologies such as GSM, these trends include the growth in network sharing, and the widespread adoption of software-defined radio technology that allows base stations to support multiple radio access technologies on a single platform.