C-RAN gains momentum among telecoms, says ABI Research

Centralized or Cloud Radio Access Networks (C-RAN) is gaining momentum among telecom service providers.

Telecom service provider China Mobile is looking at C-RAN deployments to save 30-50 percent in Capex and Opex.

ABI Research says telecom operators in East Asia have been actively supporting C-RAN structure and network virtualization to tackle increasing deployment cost.

Many equipment vendors are jumping into the growing market and trying to reshape the landscape to suit their businesses.

Signals and Systems Telecom, a research agency, last year, said though the new wave of 4G macrocell  Radio Access Network (RAN) and core network investments will not be able to compensate the overall declines in 2G and 3G equipment sales, operators are expected to significantly increase their spending in the evolving small cell and carrier Wi-Fi equipment market.

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The report said small cell and Wi-Fi offload equipment will represent a market worth $5.4 billion in 2017. Consequently the small cell and Wi-Fi offload market segment is attracting considerable attention from both established vendors as well as start-ups which solely focus on the small cell market.

ABI Research shared live examples for C-RAN deployments.

In South Korea, the country’s biggest operators, SK Telecom and KT, have implemented centralized base station architectures for their LTE networks. In October 2013, SK Telecom marked a new phase for its deployment by collaborating with Intel to develop a virtualized RAN structure.

Japanese operator NTT Docomo joined C-RAN enthusiasts in 2013 as the operator announced the adoption of the structure for its LTE-A rollout. China Mobile who had been holding major trials across the country is expected to incorporate C-RAN in its commercially deployed networks in China between 2015 and 2016.

To date, the major challenge for global adoption of C-RAN is fronthaul requirements. Transferring large amounts of data from distributed Remote Radio Heads (RRHs) to a central processing location requires extremely high bandwidth and low latency fiber links which is a part of the mobile network that remains under developed in most regions outside East Asia.

“C-RAN presence will continue to increase across the Asian region while remaining limited in other parts of the world. Other regions, where scarcity of cell sites is an issue, are likely to develop a market for partial deployment of C-RAN in densely populated areas,” said Ahmed Ali, research analyst at ABI Research.

On the other hand, distributed base station structures, which can be regarded as a step towards C-RAN from the traditional macro RAN architecture, are rapidly gaining traction, especially with LTE deployments.

In 2014, half of the RRH shipments will be LTE and by 2018, the total number of shipments will amount to more than 2 million units, almost double the number shipped in 2013. Gradual growth and development in infrastructure submarkets like RRH/BBU equipment and fronthaul solutions and even small cells will in return have a positive effect on the C-RAN market.

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