Nokia (earlier known as Nokia Solutions Networks) has overtaken Cisco to become the third largest vendor in the wireless Packet Core market, behind Ericsson and Huawei.

Nokia took significant revenue share in the overall market, and is now ranked #3 on a trailing four quarter revenue basis, said Dell’Oro Group.

“As the service providers deploying LTE expand beyond the early movers in the US, Japan and Korea, we are seeing a shift in vendor shares towards those with exposure to other regions,” said Chris DePuy, vice president at Dell’Oro Group with responsibility for Wireless Packet Core coverage.  “This has recently benefitted Nokia in particular.”

The overall Wireless Packet Core market grew 26 percent in Q1 2014. The higher growth portion of the market that is used to manage LTE wireless networks, called Evolved Packet Core (EPC), experienced significantly higher growth than the total market.

North American session growth increased to over 250 percent as compared with Q4 2013.  This follows a slowdown in the third and fourth quarters of 2013.

In the first quarter, nearly half of service provider bid responses required technical specifications for upcoming availability of Network Function Virtualization (NFV) capabilities from packet core vendors, said the report.

Meanwhile, Infonetics Research said the macrocell 2G / 3G / 4G mobile infrastructure market dipped 2 percent q-o-q and increased 11 percent y-o-y to $10.7 billion in Q1, driven by LTE 4G rollouts in China, Europe, the Middle East, and Latin America.

“LTE almost fully offset the abyssal decline of 2G and 3G and was characterized by an interesting dynamic: the tremendous growth of the evolved packet core (EPC) and E-UTRAN. E-UTRAN was driven by the second wave of LTE rollouts, and EPC was fueled by first-wave LTE adopters’ core capacity upgrades,” said Stephane Teral, principal analyst for mobile infrastructure and carrier economics at Infonetics Research.

Recently, Gartner has positioned Ericsson as an LTE industry leader within the Leaders quadrant of its Gartner 2014 Magic Quadrant for LTE Infrastructure report for the fifth year in a row. Gartner evaluates end-to-end vendors of LTE equipment (including Radio, Evolved Packet Core and IMS for voice over LTE) based on their ability to execute and completeness of vision in the LTE market.

Baburajan K