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Cellular infrastructure vendors set to score

Edited by the Electronicstalk editorial team Dec 6, 2004

As mobile operators continue to build towards a totally cellular world, infrastructure vendors will be the benefactors throughout the decade, according to a new report.

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 Visant 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, whereas cdma2000 and GSM/GPRS systems will also be abundant in 2009 as over 2.4 million basestations 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 markets in many cases, and are turning to GSM/GPRS and Edge while other operators, in more lucrative markets, 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 use throughout the regions and how the 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.