Making money out of RAN equipment has been tough. Well known brand names such as Motorola, Siemens, Alcatel and Lucent have been subsumed by the big three – Ericsson, Huawei and Nokia – who now dominate over 80% of worldwide sales.
There have been huge investments in LTE in recent years – US networks were the first to adopt LTE in a mass scale, China Mobile has built out over 1 million LTE macrocells and now over 480 networks worldwide have commercial LTE capability But these new technology upgrades have now achieved their initial goals and are moving on to the next phase. Relatively few new macrocell towers are being installed.
