Europe
: As mobile operators in both saturated markets and emerging ones
continue to build towards a totally cellular world, infrastructure
vendors will be the benefactors throughout the decade, a new Visant
Strategies report finds. Hundreds of thousands of base stations will
be deployed annually until the end of the decade, according to the
just published study "World Mobile Infrastructure Report."
"There
are really a couple of distinct markets out there today for infrastructure
vendors," said Visant Strategies Senior Analyst and report author
Larry Swasey. "Operators in developed markets will begin to bear
the fruit of third generation infrastructure investments beginning
next year and will continue to build out those networks as they bring
subscribers over from their existing networks. Emerging markets will
complete the first swath of redundant and competitive national services
near the end of the decade through the use of 2G and 2.5G air interfaces.
All of this bodes well for the infrastructure vendors and those associated
with cellular sales."
According to the
report, both EDGE and WCDMA will do well as third generation alternatives
with the two complementing each other in some cases, while CDMA2000
and GSM/GPRS systems will also be abundant in 2009 as over 2.4 million
base stations deployed worldwide serve over 2.1 billion cellular subscribers.
The report found that many operators are not concerned with WCDMA
at this time due to the fiscal constraints of their respective markets
in many cases, and are turning to GSM/GPRS and EDGE. Other operators
in more lucrative markets, according to the report, are already serving
or will serve subscribers well through WCDMA deployments.
The report
details subscriber and base station growth through 2009 by air-interface
and region and also calculates high-speed data users including mid-speed
GSM/GPRS subscribers and CDMA2000 high-speed users. The world's regions
are broken down including a discussion of growth, which air-interfaces
will likely be mostly utilized throughout the regions and how 2G,
2.5G and 3G infrastructure will be deployed from 2004-2009. Also explained
are those operators and regions that are influencing which 3G air-interfaces
are being deployed and how purveyors of CDMA2000, GSM/GPRS, EDGE,
and WCDMA will fare overall.