Yes, you are reading it right. LTE is gaining momentum and is likely to surpass WiMAX equipment deployments by 2011. This has been forecast by IDC, in recently released report on ‘Wirless Cellular Infrastructure Report 2010-2014: LTE Arrives’. This doesn’t sound like good news for WiMAX forum, who recently protested over Qualcomm’s bid for BWA Spectrum in India. In my earlier post, where I raised doubts over Qualcomm’s bid for BWA spectrum & hurdles in entire process, recent IDC report shows that, market is still open for new standard, even though it doesn’t show enough prospects as of now.
According to released report, more than dozen LTE networks are going to be live this year and LTE will exceed WiMAX network deployments by end of 2011. Also report forecasts that worldwide LTE Infra revenue will fall just below $8 billion by 2o14. Let’s highlight the findings of report:-
- More than 100 leading telecom operators are favoring LTE over WiMAX, which includes nine out of top ten operators.
- LTE provides capacity support/offload 3G, making it complementary technology for 3G.
- NSN, who lost to Huawei as second largest telecom equipment maker worldwide in year 2009, is finding it hard to compete in LTE space. Same is true for Alcatel-Lucent. With growing influence, Huawei is poised to challenge Ericsson in LTE deployments very soon.
- In 2010, all LTE vendors, including the likes of Motorola, NEC, and Fujitsu, are increasing their go-to-market efforts, further amplifying competitive pressures.
- Iconic Smartphone devices, coupled with growing mobile broadband laptop use, will continue to drive the explosion in mobile data traffic.
Despite bright prospects, there are many hurdles to LTE deployments. WiMAX proponents challenge LTE on grounds of network/standard maturity. Besides that the commitment to LTE deployments among operators varies largely. WiMAX has 4-5 years of head-start over LTE, which is likely to be offset by LTE’s reduced cost of data delivery, which is fundamentally most attractive part of deployments. Also, there’re concerns over spectrum availability for LTE. In India, where 3G/BWA auction is in progress, companies like Qualcomm are likely to use BWA spectrum in 2.3 GHz for TD-LTE deployments. But according to TRAI Paper, which I quoted earlier too, if LTE is deployed in 700 MHz band, it would save around 70{af589cdba9d77786c8c861317dbad60bba1e2ebbf56e2ffab874a1b59fde9ce3} of cost of network deployment, compared to 2.1 GHz LTE deployment (compared to 2.3GHz, saving would be even higher). But there’s no spectrum available for Telecom in 700 MHz band in India. 700 MHz band spectrum has already been allocated to Doordarshan to operate digital transmitters in metros, but there’re no rollouts either. Who will favor LTE amid ambiguity? As said, market is still open…
