By Alex Scroxton08 July 2008
The struggling mobile base
station market is set for a renaissance over the next three years, according to
a report released by business intelligence consultancy Informa Telecoms &
Media.
The boom will come off the
back of rising mobile broadband traffic, which is set to rise by 1088% to over
1,900 petabytes, said Informa.
However, the analysts warned
that network operators won’t see the fruits of this boom. Data revenues,
predicted data analyst Mike Roberts, will be squeezed as unless the popular
flat-rate tariffs run by most networks are phased out.
“This will push mobile
network costs and architectures to breaking point, and will lead to everything
from network sharing and spectrum refarming to the launch of femtocells and
next-generation networks," he said.
Ultimately, networks will be
forced to invest in technology such as WiMAX as their margins are squeezed even
tighter, said Roberts, who believed that both WiMAX and LTE base station sales
would top sales of CDMA kit by 2012.
