A new report from In-Stat/MDR, ‘5-year Cellular Base Station Forecast: The Sun Has Started To Shine Through The Clouds’, says that after the transitional year of 2003 for cellular base station sales, 2004 is the year when reality catches up with the vision. Operators around the world are starting to aggressively execute plans that have been on-hold for a number of years, even customers are starting to show signs of excitement claims the report. 2004 will see a fall in worldwide revenues from base station sales by 14.4% over 2003. However, the number of base stations actually sold will increase from 329,483 to 333,876 year on year.

Overall, the trend in new base station deployments from 2003 to 2008 is generally down, although In-Stat/MDR believes that there will be a small upswing in 2008, as more demand for data services starts to emerge. According to Allen Nogee, a Principal Analyst with In-Stat/MDR: "As base station technology becomes more efficient, the worldwide need for new base stations decreases. In addition, many modern base stations simply don’t need to be replaced. They have operated, and will continue to operate for many years. Rather, much of the new base station demand is related to the need for greater capacity to handle an ever-increasing amount of subscribers, in addition to added capacity to handle the growing demand for cellular data services".

The report also forecasts strong growth for W-CDMA through 2008, with the 3G technology representing 23.1% of deployed base stations worldwide. Although this represents a very impressive showing by W-CDMA, with worldwide subscriber numbers predicted to have reached 15mn, this number still only represents one subscriber in 100. GSM will still have 61.5% of the deployed base station market.
Ian Channing