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March 19, 2014

Wireless BTS Market Grew 23 Percent in 2013

EJL Wireless Research has released a new report on the growth of the wireless base transmitting station (BTS) worldwide market.

According to the report, the growing adoption of new technologies like LTE is fueling a growth in the number of base station installations. The global BTS market grew by 23 percent last year, according to the report entitled  “Global Base Station Market Analysis and Forecast, 10th Edition, 2014-2018.”

“2013 was the year of LTE as new network deployments drove demand to record levels,” said EJL founder and president, Earl Lum.

The report covers all the wireless standards supported by companies such as Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Huawei Technologies, Nokia Solution Networks, Samsung Electronics, and ZTE.

Along with the growth of BTS deployments, the number of BTS shipments increased dramatically over the past year.

Similar to the BTS transceiver market, LTE BTS shipments increased significantly, up 280 percent in 2013, as demand for LTE-TDD in China drove shipment volumes. We estimate that TDD-LTE BTS accounted for 28 percent of overall LTE BTS shipments in 2013, compared with 16 percent in 2012. Distributed RRU (dRRU) BTS shipments were 73 percent of the market in 2013 as compared with 42 percent in 2012,” Lum said.

The report also highlights how much growth in the BTS industry is happening outside of the U.S. Huawei was the top supplier of BTS equipment overall, as well as for GSM, CDMA and LTE. Ericsson was the top W-CDMA/HSPA+ BTS supplier.

The company’s predictions weren’t all rosy. EJL predicted the global number of BTS shipments to decline by 17 percent in 2014. Global shipments of LTE-FDD will decrease by 13 percent and shipments of LTE-TDD will decrease by 25 percent. Shipments of W-CDMA/HSPA+ will decline by 26 percent.

These declines could be explained by carriers saturating the areas they’re covering. They can only install so many base stations before reaching diminishing returns. 




Edited by Cassandra Tucker


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