“Provisioning 4G services and spectrum re-farming will provide a welcome boost to the wireless infrastructure market. ABI Research estimates that 4G equipment spending on base stations will reach almost $3 billion in 2011, and potentially $16.5 billion in 2016,” said Jake Saunders, VP for forecasting at ABI.
According to ABI Research, in 2011 approximately 32,000 base stations will be upgraded and retrofitted to support 4G services. Approximately 19,000 base stations will be deployed onto new sites to help infill capacity and remove dead spots and poor coverage zones for 4G enterprise and residential users. A considerable amount of that equipment will be in the 2.5 GHz and related bands, but operators will be keen to deploy into lower frequency bands.
In a number of countries, regulators are clawing back the spectrum generously allocated to analog broadcast television and auctioning off the digital dividend frequency bands (790-862 MHz) to help support the rollout of 4G mobile network services, especially for more widely scattered towns and villages.