In-Stat Unveils its Latest Report on EDGE Dominance

Enhanced Data rate for GSM Evolution (EDGE) is a revolutionary technology that is believed to make a significant impact on coverage and capacity. In addition to making base station sitting quicker and easier, the technology will allow operators to considerably enjoy a lower network cost in terms of both site deployment and operations. EDGE carries data speeds up to 236.8 kilobits for 4 timeslots, in packet mode.

 

The latest report from In-Stat reveals that EDGE will dominate new base station deployments in 2009 with over 40 percent of new base station deployments.

 

Research and consulting service provider, In-Stat (News - Alert) is a strategic segment of the $9 billion Reed Elsevier global information network and a division of a business-to-business publisher in the U.S. In-Stat offers in-depth market intelligence to support critical business, product and technology decisions.

 

In-Stat’s report on EDGE clearly clarifies that though EDGE is technologically widely accepted, the slowdown in the global economy is definitely having an effect on the EDGE base station deployments as operators push out deployments. Report indicates that there will be a slight decline in new EDGE base station deployments from 2008 to 2009, thus 2008 is the year which has seen maximum number of EDGE deployments.

 

New EDGE base station deployments will continue to dominate the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, said the report.

 

“EDGE will still lead new base station deployments for some time,” says Allen Nogee, In-Stat analyst.

 

“However, HSUPA is on the horizon. Strong deployments in the Asia Pacific, Western Europe and North America promise to make the cross over point from EDGE to HSUPA in new deployments occur in 2011,” added Nogee.

 

High-Speed Uplink Packet Access (HSUPA) is a 3G mobile telephony protocol and an up-link evolution technology with up-link speeds up to 5.76 Mbit/s. In-Stat’s report clearly indicates that HSUPA dominates new deployments in Western Europe; however, the levels of deployments will follow a bi-modal distribution with peaks in 2007 and 2012.

 

According to In-Stat’s research report, after a far better 2007 for worldwide base station shipments, results for 2008 were weak. In 2007, many new 3G networks were rolled out around the world, and GSM subscriber growth was occurring at a fast clip, driven by millions of new subscribers in India, Africa, and China.

 

However, such trends, as per the report, could not prevent total worldwide base station shipments from dropping sharply this year compared to 2007.

 

In-Stat’s report has made a clear cut indication that 2009 will see a sharp rise in the number of TD-SCDMA base stations shipped.