ABI Research Focuses on Base Station Shipments

In its new report, titled “Wireless Infrastructure Market Data,” ABI Research has stated that base station installations in 2011 will total at least 10 percent more than anyone expected just one year ago.

Although only two countries in particular are significant for its growth, there are a number of factors contributing to the increase in base station shipments. By the end of 2011, operators in China will more than double their number of 3G subscribers with low-cost smartphones becoming popular there. Meanwhile, US operators are investing large amounts of CAPEX in 4G, the company stated in a press release.

“Existing networks are struggling to cope with the surge in data traffic, so operators are forced to increase capacity,” says Jim Eller, principal analyst for wireless infrastructure, ABI Research “However, operators are finding new revenue opportunities with mobile data, which more than compensate for decreasing voice revenues, so they are expecting good returns on this investment. Moving 2G subscribers to 3G, and 3G to 4G, results in more efficiencies for operators and allows operators to offer more data services.”

While AT&T is starting to launch LTE services in major cities around the country, and Sprint’s Network Vision will see most of their existing infrastructure replaced by multi-mode base stations that can support 2G, 3G, and 4G simultaneously, reports indicate that Verizon has installed or upgraded 20,000 to 30,000 base stations over the past 16 months, ABI stated.

Recently, the company released another report titled, “Conditional Access and Digital Rights Management for Pay TV Markets,” where the company focused on the conditional access systems (CAS) market.

Within the pay TV infrastructure, ABI Research’s report, “Conditional Access and Digital Rights Management for Pay TV Markets,” covers worldwide markets for CAS and DRM technologies. It provides market shares of managed subscribers on a regional and platform level as well as revenue forecasts for the markets.