Growth Drives Remote Radio Heads to Nearly $1B in 2012

​The demands of cost reduction and greater efficiency in cellular base station design are leading to a rapidly growing market for remote radio heads. According to a new study from ABI Research, this market is on track to exceed a value of $1 billion in 2017. Cellular base stations are now undergoing a design revolution. A base station was traditionally a rack of equipment inside a shelter. That design is now becoming anachronistic because it is expensive, and because the required coaxial cable running up the tower to the antennas often results in significant losses of power. The solution: “distributed base stations,” in which the RF portion (along with suitable processing and an optical interface) is placed into a weatherproof box mounted on the tower near the antennas.

“Reducing operating costs is especially important now,” notes Aditya Kaul, practice director, “so the remote radio head has become an integral part of these new distributed base stations. Remote radio heads are also very ‘smart’: almost all are software-controlled and can be configured remotely to handle a number of air interface technologies within a given air interface family.”

“Until recently remote radio heads were just considered as base station subsystems,” notes Lance Wilson, research director. “But now, especially with the advent of OFDM technologies such as LTE and WiMAX, their use has become much more important. Service providers are also upgrading their networks with remote radio heads purchased as standalone products, helping to create a market which will show high growth in both revenue and shipments.”

ABI Research’s “Remote Radio Heads” study examines the ways in which radio heads will capture an increasing share within the BTS marketplace. It includes shipments and revenue forecasts for 2012-2017 segmented by air interface, as well as ASP and vendor market share data.

These findings are part of ABI Research’s Tower Top RF Electronics Research Services which include Research Reports, Market Data, Insights, and Competitive Assessments.

ABI Research provides in-depth analysis and quantitative forecasting of trends in global connectivity and other emerging technologies. From offices in North America, Europe and Asia, ABI Research’s worldwide team of experts advises thousands of decision makers through 70+ research and advisory services. Est. 1990. For more information visit www.abiresearch.com, or call +1.516.624.2500.