Microwave Equipment Market to Grow Exponentially Between 2008 and 2011

The worldwide sales of wireless radio equipment using microwave signals, or microwave equipment is expected to grow 83 percent between 2008 and 2011, according to a new report published by Infonetics Research.

 

In 2007, the global sales of the wireless radio equipment using microwave signals, or microwave equipment topped $3.9 billion.

 

The report says that Ericsson is the “worldwide leader” in microwave equipment revenue market share, while NEC (News - Alert) leads in unit market share

 

The latest report from Infonetics, entitled “Microwave Equipment Market Outlook,” notes that the microwave equipment market is being driven by the swelling mobile backhaul market.

 

The report observes that mobile operators are increasingly opting for Ethernet microwave to serve rising mobile broadband traffic demands.

 

Since most of the cell-sites are not fiber-fed, Infonetics report considers microwave to be an attractive backhaul solution because it does not incur recurring monthly charges like T1/E1 lines do.

 

The report also finds that an increasing proportion of mobile traffic is data-orientated, and this is making mobile operators to migrate their backhaul away from legacy TDM-based systems to packet-based Ethernet solutions.

 

Microwave first-mile access equipment is a small but stable market. This market, according to the report, is driven by several niche—often mission-critical applications such as emergency response/disaster recovery, back-up/redundancy and access in remote areas

 

“Mobile operators cannot afford to cap investment in their backhaul networks or they run the risk of losing customers in what are already highly competitive markets,” said Richard Webb, research directing analyst for WiMAX (News - Alert), microwave and mobile devices at Infonetics.

 

He does not expect mobile network usage to significantly slow during the current recession. Webb believes that bandwidth demand for mobile backhaul will continue to rise and, in turn, so will demand for microwave equipment, particularly Ethernet microwave equipment.

 

This Infonetics' report tracks Adtran, Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert), Cambridge Broadband, Ceragon, DragonWave, Ericsson, Exalt, Harris-Stratex, Huawei, Motorola, NEC, Nokia-Siemens Networks, Nortel, ZTE and others.