The C-RAN architecture equipment market – dominated by Ericsson, Nokia Networks, and Samsung — is likely to top $10 billion by 2018 from about $4 billion in 2012, said Infonetics Research.
Since telecom operator Orange in Europe and Sprint in North America are going to deploy C-RAN, these regions will the adoption in 2015.
C-RAN is emerging as the default 5G architecture and will eventually morph into cloud RAN as more and more mobile network functions are virtualized.
Incidentally, the telecom industry is yet to see any commercial deployments of C-RAN.
Main growth drivers will be RAN expansion in the West and the beginning of 5G rollouts in Japan and South Korea.
Site engineering and antenna site simplification lead to less and smaller equipment, lower power consumption, better radio performance, LTE-Advanced readiness, and agile and flexible network topologies, and these are the main drivers of centralized RAN (C-RAN).
Baseband units (BBUs) account for 62 percent of overall C-RAN revenue, as they are the most expensive component of this type of architecture.
