Asia-Pacific region set to be the largest market for LTE

According to ABI Research latest report, Asia-Pacific regional growth in basestations will outpace all other regions this year as it continues to account for the majority of worldwide basestation deployments. The Asia-Pacific region now becomes the largest market for LTE, followed by North America and Western Europe, with the Asia-Pacific regional installed base growing to 8X in 2014.

LTE macro RAN spending is also set to reach $35B this year as LTE expenditures account for a majority of RAN spending with Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia Solutions and Networks, and Alcatel-Lucent among the companies set to benefit.

One of the main mobile network operators behind this trend is China Mobile, a major proponent of Time-Division LTE or TD-LTE, and one of the three nationwide carriers in China licensed to deploy 4G networks. “After deploying over 200,000 TD-LTE basestations last year, China Mobile now plans a massive expansion of more than 500,000 basestations to deploy in 31 provinces, municipalities, and autonomous regions by the end of 2014,” says Nick Marshall, principal analyst at ABI Research. “The company plans peak CAPEX in 2014 and 2015 to help construct what the company claims will be the world’s largest 4G network.”

By 2019, ABI Research expects China will dominate the LTE basestation market in the Asia-Pacific region, and have the largest LTE installed base in the world. By then, China will have over 65% of the worldwide LTE installed base, and it will be challenging for infrastructure vendors to achieve scale economies without a major presence there.

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