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First Commercial 5G Core expected in 2020

The latest Wireless Packet Core 5-Year Forecast report shows that the projected five-year compounded annual revenue growth rate (CAGR) for the Wireless Packet Core (WPC) market is 3 Percent (2018-2023).

“Initial 5G New Radio (5G NR) network launches are being implemented with 5G Non-standalone (5G NSA) architectures that utilize the 4G Evolved Packet Core (EPC); therefore we have pushed out by one year (from 2019 to 2020), our expectations of when we will see the first commercial deployments of 5G Core,” said Dave Bolan, analyst with the Dell’Oro Group.

“WPC revenue growth is expected to continue throughout the forecast period due primarily to subscriber growth, migration of more subscribers to VoLTE, and increasing data usage per subscriber. Other factors contributing to growth is the upgrade of EPC to a control and user plane separation (CUPS) architecture to handle 5G traffic and Internet of Things (IoT),” added Bolan.

Other highlights from the Wireless Packet Core 5-Year Forecast Report:

  • EPC will be the workhorse for the core throughout the forecast period. We expect it to peak in revenue in 2022. From a volume perspective, the number of sessions for EPC will increase through 2023.
  • The drive toward Network Function Virtualization (NFV) with cloud-native virtual network functions (VNFs) will continue in the forecast period increasing the share of the revenue to 88% in 2023.

The Dell’Oro Group Wireless Packet Core 5-Year Forecast Report offers a comprehensive overview of market trends by network function implementation (Non-NFV and NFV), covering revenue, sessions, average selling price, and regional forecasts for various network functions.

To access the full report, contact us at dgsales@delloro.com.

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The latest Dell’Oro Group Optical Transport 5-Year forecast report claims that the cumulative Optical Transport equipment spend is projected to approach $80 billion over the next five years. The majority of the Optical Transport revenue will be driven by demand for coherent 200+ Gbps wavelengths.

“The market demand for 100 Gbps will continue to be large, but all future optical transport market growth will be driven by sales of higher wavelength speeds,” said Jimmy Yu, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group. “We believe service providers are still motivated to chase better spectral efficiencies to economically increase network capacity while maintaining their capital spend. Hence, the desire to migrate to higher wavelength speeds such as 200 Gbps and 400 Gbps. Fortunately, component and system manufacturers are striving to deliver better coherent solutions with each new product generation.  As a result, optical routes that once were only serviced by 100 Gbps wavelengths are now serviceable by 200 Gbps wavelengths and 400 Gbps in the future,” continued Yu.

Additional highlights from the Optical Transport 5-Year Forecast Report:

  • The cumulative spend on Optical Transport equipment during the next five years is projected to grow 16 percent.
  • Revenue from coherent 200+ Gbps DWDM shipments is forecast to grow at a 30 percent compounded annual growth rate.
  • Disaggregated WDM systems will be a larger share of the market.

About the report – The Dell’Oro Group Optical Transport 5-Year Forecast Report offers a complete overview of the Optical Transport industry with tables covering manufacturers’ revenue, average selling prices, unit shipments, Tributary/Line or Wavelength shipments (by speed up to 600 Gbps).  The report tracks DWDM long haul terrestrial, WDM metro, multiservice multiplexers, and optical switch equipment.

To access the report, please contact us by email at dgsales@delloro.com.

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5G NR Expected to Advance at a Faster Pace Than LTE

The latest Mobile RAN 5-year forecast report claims the robust demand for 5G NR will propel the cumulative worldwide RAN market to nearly $160 B over the next five years.

“Even if 5G will be just another ‘G’ initially, the reality is that for the carriers with the right spectrum assets, the mid-band Massive MIMO business case can be extremely compelling for the MBB use case,” said Stefan Pongratz, analyst with the Dell’Oro Group. “At the same time, we are more optimistic today about the mmW opportunity than we were a year ago. But, clearly, it will take some with the current inter-site distances before the cost per GB economics will be as favorable with the mmW spectrum as the mid-band sub-6 GHz spectrum using the existing macro grid and Massive MIMO,” continued Pongratz.

Other highlights from the Mobile RAN 5-Year Forecast Report:

  • 5G NR will scale at a significantly faster pace than LTE.
  • Sub-6 GHz spectrum is expected to drive the lion share of the RAN capex (Figure 1).
  • New capex spending on IoT, Fixed Wireless Access, In-Building, and Public Safety opportunities for both private and public deployments will compose a double-digit share of the RAN market by 2023.
  • Sub-6 GHz Massive MIMO transceiver shipments are projected to eclipse 200 million.

Dell’Oro Group’s Mobile RAN 5-Year Forecast Report offers a complete overview of the Mobile RAN industry with tables covering manufacturers’ revenue, transceivers or RF carrier shipments, unit shipments for base station controllers, and base transceiver stations for 5GNR, 5G NR Sub 6 GHz, 5G NR mmW, LTE, LTE FDD, LTE TDD, WCDMA, GSM, CDMA, and WiMAX. The report also include splits for macro and non-residential small cells and Massive MIMO.

To access the report, please contact us by email at dgsales@delloro.com.

 

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Huawei captured 28 percent share of the telecom equipment market, increasing its market share by 4 percentage points since 2015.

We just wrapped up the 3Q 2018 reporting period for all the Telecommunications Infrastructure programs.

For the first nine months of 2018, the top five equipment manufacturers were Huawei, Nokia, Ericsson, Cisco, and ZTE. Combined these five companies accounted for about 75% of the worldwide service provider equipment market revenue.

Additional key takeaways from the reports period include:

  • The overall telecom equipment market declined 2 percent year-over-year for the 1Q 2018 through 3Q18 period. Robust demand for Optical Transport and Microwave Transmission equipment was not enough to offset declining Core and Service Provider Router revenues.
  • Huawei’s revenue share continued to improve in 2018—up around four percentage points between 2015 and the first nine months of 2018. During this period, Ericsson’s and Nokia’s market share declined one and three percentage points, respectively.
  • Huawei’s telecom equipment revenue is nearly as large as Nokia and Ericsson combined.
  • Huawei’s revenue share gains over the past four years have been most pronounced in the Core, Router, and Optical Transport Markets.

Dell’Oro Group telecommunication infrastructure research programs consist of the following: Broadband Access, Carrier IP Telephony, Microwave Transmission & Mobile Backhaul, Mobile Radio Access Network, Optical Transport, Router & Carrier Ethernet Switch, Telecom Capex, Wide Area IoT, and Wireless Packet Core.

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On December 6th, Adtran announced that it had acquired broadband and virtual customer premises equipment (CPE) supplier SmartRG for an undisclosed sum. The move provides Adtran with an infusion of tier 2 and 3 customers in the Americas, along with a line of broadband CPE hardware running the gamut from ADSL2+ to GPON to DOCSIS.

More importantly, SmartRG gives Adtran a comprehensive and well-regarded SDN and NFV platform for the delivery of vCPE functions that can be integrated into Adtran’s Mosaic SD-Access platform. With SmartRG’s SmartOS, Adtran can now extend its microservices architecture from the access network all the way into the home, something that rival Calix has been touting via its Gigaspire series of CPE and EXOS SDN architecture.

For Adtran, the acquisition was a necessary move to keep pace with its chief broadband access rival in North America.

The addition of SmartRG is also reflective of the need tier 2 and tier 3 operators have for remote and software-defined provisioning, monitoring, and troubleshooting of broadband CPE and home networking devices in an age of growing interest in IoT. These smaller, often rural operators, absolutely require solutions that will both reduce their overall operating costs while also positioning them to increase top-line broadband revenue through the addition of new services, including managed WiFi and home automation services.

If you take a look at SmartRG’s customer base and where the company has excelled to date, it is among tier 3 RLECs, co-ops, and ISPs who service areas where the average truck roll could be 2x-3x the cost of a truck roll for an operator in a more urban area. These are the operators who provide an immediate business case for remote provisioning of residential CPE. For them, there is simply no room to send a truck whenever a client has connectivity issues. If 80% of those issues can be diagnosed from the main office, then that dramatically improves the margin profile for these operators’ broadband services.

Remote provisioning and troubleshooting is where SmartRG cut its teeth.

SmartRG was spun out of ClearAccess, a provider of TR-069 software, when the company was acquired by Cisco in 2012. At the time, Cisco was one of the leading suppliers of broadband CPE, particularly to cable operators. Cisco had acquired Scientific-Atlanta back in 2005 and Linksys in 2003. Cable operators around the world were in the process of moving to a TR-069-based architecture for managing their increasingly complex DOCSIS gateways and EMTAs. TR-069 would allow MSOs to offer self-installation and remote provisioning of CPE for new and existing subscribers, thereby eliminating the need to roll a truck for each new customer.

Meanwhile, SmartRG had combined its existing hardware design along with the knowledge of how to deliver TR-069-based architectures to address the needs of smaller ISPs in the North American market, where it found considerable traction.

Flash forward to today, where the tenets and efficiency goals of TR-069 have been encapsulated and reborn as a small part of the overarching NFV and vCPE concepts. When combined with its Mosaic-based SD-Access solution, Adtran can now provide its customers with visibility from the access network all the way into the home, regardless the physical WAN interface. If a customer is experiencing connectivity issues, the service provider can diagnose whether the underlying problem is a fiber cut, interference, or routing table issue in the access network, or whether it is due to channel interference, the addition of a new peripheral, or a DHCP issue in the home or small office. Again, diagnosing and troubleshooting these issues without needing to roll a truck is a critically important money-saving feature all broadband providers, both small and large, are demanding for their networks.