Research firm Dell’Oro Group recently revealed the performance of Huawei, Ericsson, Nokia, ZTE and Samsung in the radio access network (RAN) infrastructure equipment market.
The global revenue from RAN infrastructure equipment market — 2G, 3G and 4G networks, excluding home small cells – declined. The total RAN market is projected to drop 2 percent in 2018, the report said.
RAN deployments
# Sprint deploying Massive MIMO base stations in 2.5 GHz spectrum
# T-Mobile advancing 600 MHz network to support both LTE and 5G
# AT&T deploying Band 14-capable LTE base stations for the FirstNet network
# AT&T working on a third of its cells sites in 2018 to support the FirstNet upgrade
Top RAN vendor rankings
#1 Huawei
#2 Ericsson
#3 Nokia
#4 ZTE
#5 Samsung
Huawei’s RAN business achieved positive growth in Europe and parts of the APAC region. Huawei’s RAN business revenue growth was stable in the Latin America region. Huawei’s RAN business did not perform well in China due to weaker demand for mobile broadband.
Ericsson has achieved a solid quarter. Ericsson’s RAN business fell in the last four years. Ericsson’s RAN business did not perform well in China and Japan. But North America, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa regions contributed to Ericsson’s RAN business.
Ericsson’s new radio platform, Ericsson Radio System (ERS), accounted for about 84 percent of the shipments in the quarter against 61 percent in 2017.
Samsung is supplying Massive MIMO radios to SoftBank-owned Sprint and a sub 6 GHz macro to Verizon.
Huawei, Ericsson and Nokia accounted for 83 percent of the global RAN market in Q1 2018, down slightly from 84 percent share in 2017.
RAN forecast
A report published by ABI Research said the RAN base-station equipment market will grow at a CAGR of 5 percent to exceed $26 billion in 2023.
Spending on indoor equipment which represents 27 percent of this market will grow at a CAGR of 15.5 percent to represent a value of 42 percent of the total by 2023.
The Asia Pacific region, which includes some of the largest and growing RAN markets in the world, will continue to dominate the market with a share of 58 percent of the market, with North America and Europe ranking a distant second and third respectively.
Sales of infrastructure equipment in the North American and Asia Pacific regions will continue to be dominated by replacement and upgrades to LTE with the addition of 5G equipment gaining share starting in 2019.
Small cell companies such as Acceleran, Airspan, Airvana / CommScope, Comba, Contela, ip. access, Parallel Wireless, Ruckus / Arris, and SpiderCloud Wireless / Corning will also gain from the RAN market growth.
Baburajan K
