Mobile Infrastructure market sees fastest growth since 2014

Following three consecutive years of contracting worldwide Radio Access Networks (RAN) revenues, the overall Mobile Infrastructure market improved at a high single-digit rate in the third quarter - recording the strongest growth rate since 2014.

These results were revealed in a recently published report from Dell'Oro Group, a source for market information about the telecommunications, networks, and data center IT industries.

ZTE's RAN business gained five points share and recovered rapidly in the quarter.

The vendor was able to reclaim its number four position during 3Q 2018.

"The results in the quarter support the thesis we have communicated for some time that market conditions are improving," says Dell'Oro Group senior director Stefan Pongratz.

"In addition to resurging investments in the North America region propelled by operators investing in LTE and 5G ready networks, the Asia Pacific region rebounded after multiple quarters of steep declines, reflecting improved momentum in China.

The report also shows that while the vendor rankings for the top three vendors remained unchanged with Huawei, Ericsson, and Nokia leading the market, the gap between Huawei and Ericsson narrowed sequentially.

ZTE was able to reclaim its number four position after Samsung briefly surpassed ZTE during 2Q 2018.

Dell'Oro Group's Mobile RAN Quarterly Report offers an overview of the Mobile RAN industry, macro and non-residential small cells, with tables covering manufacturers' revenue, transceivers or RF carrier shipments, unit shipments for 5G NR Millimeter Wave, 5G NR Sub 6 GHz, LTE-FDD, LTE-TDD, WCDMA, GSM, and CDMA base transceiver stations.

"Mobile data traffic continues to grow at an unabated pace," Dell'Oro Group has published on their  Mobile Radio Access Network report page.

"Equipment suppliers continue to push the technology envelope to ensure service providers can manage the exponential data growth and improve speed/coverage/capacity/quality of their networks.

"The constantly changing and increasingly demanding end-user expectations provide opportunities for the equipment vendors to differentiate their solutions while new entrants and service provider consolidation continue to pressure equipment prices downward.