LTE equipment revenues will compensate for declining income from legacy GSM and CDMA infrastructure as deployments push forward in the United States, China and Latin America, according a new study from Technology Business Research (TBR). The report claims that Ericsson took a commanding lead in LTE market share in 2012, gaining orders from many Tier 1 operators. Nokia Siemens Networks also benefited from early LTE orders.
However, Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent and ZTE will see their LTE fortunes rise as China Mobile deploys TD-LTE, TBR said. (Indeed, an official Chinese media source reported that Beijing plans to issue 4G network licences by the end of the year.) China Mobile plans to deploy 200,000 TD-LTE base stations in 2013 in a bid to jumpstart its LTE network, and these three vendors are likely to land the highest shares of the contract. Huawei and ZTE will benefit from select LTE rollouts in Europe, where they will be aggressive on price to supplant NSN and Alcatel-Lucent from existing accounts, TBR said. Release