LTE infrastructure investment expected to peak this year

Analyst house IHS is forecasting global LTE mobile infrastructure revenue to peak at $23.3 billion in 2015, after which the rate of LTE rollouts will start to decline.

Scott Bicheno

June 8, 2015

1 Min Read
LTE infrastructure investment expected to peak this year

Analyst house IHS is forecasting global LTE mobile infrastructure revenue to peak at $23.3 billion in 2015, after which the rate of LTE rollouts will start to decline.

It looks like operator spend on LTE kit has really gathered momentum over the past year, with South Korea, Japan and the US leading the way and validating the technology and its commercialisation to the rest of the world. Many Western European markets have followed, as has China, but there is still a lot of untapped global potential for LTE network rollout, as concluded by Ericsson in its recent report.

“As we anticipated, we’re reaching the peak of LTE rollouts, and LTE is now set to perform at $6 billion a quarter for some time as operators complete their major remaining rollouts,” said Stéphane Téral of IHS.

This $6 billion run rate was achieved in Q1 2015, and that represented a 4% year-on-year increase but a 1% decline on the previous quarter’s spend. Overall telco kit sales of $11 billion was also up 4% year-on-year thanks mainly to Chinese TDD LTE spend, but it was down 8% sequentially as LTE rollouts failed to fully compensate for declining investment in older technologies.

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About the Author

Scott Bicheno

As the Editorial Director of Telecoms.com, Scott oversees all editorial activity on the site and also manages the Telecoms.com Intelligence arm, which focuses on analysis and bespoke content.
Scott has been covering the mobile phone and broader technology industries for over ten years. Prior to Telecoms.com Scott was the primary smartphone specialist at industry analyst Strategy Analytics’. Before that Scott was a technology journalist, covering the PC and telecoms sectors from a business perspective.
Follow him @scottbicheno

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