Despite the global financial crisis and ensuing recession, as well as the growing buzz around the 3GPP-backed Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard, the WiMAX ecosystem experienced a surprisingly healthy year in 2008, although it also witnessed the end of the WiMAX hype. Mobile WiMAX in particular has made significant inroads, although shipments did not reach the levels many had predicted.

3.2 million Broadband Wireless Access CPEs were shipped in 2008, representing a 53% year-over-year growth. 151 000 base station sectors were shipped in the same period. All together, revenues from terminals and base stations exceeded US$2billion – a remarkable performance when considering the particularly difficult conditions in the last two quarters of 2008.

Mobile WiMAX has truly become a BWA industry paradigm. It not only accounted for about half of the total CPE shipments in 2008, but MIMO-enabled mobile WiMAX devices were predominant with about 1.2 million units shipped over the course of the year. Although MIMO mobile WiMAX devices had just been introduced into the market in 2007, new deployments in various regions worldwide created a substantial market for MIMO mobile WiMAX terminals and for infrastructure equipment. The expansion of existing WiMAX networks and the conversion of some existing networks from fixed to mobile WiMAX has also contributed to these shipments.

What is really remarkable is that mobile WiMAX did not really cannibalize the market for fixed WiMAX and pre-WiMAX equipment. The market for fixed WiMAX equipment did not vanish over the past year; many operators continued rolling out infrastructure, sourcing terminals and adding new users using 802.16d-2004 technology. CPE shipments reached 880,000 in 2008.

In the infrastructure arena, vendors such as Motorola and Alvarion who previously had a strong foothold in the fixed WiMAX and pre-WiMAX markets were able to leverage their existing customer bases and secure comfortable market shares. Thanks to the maturity of their solutions in mobile WiMAX and the richness of their device ecosystems, other vendors such as Alcatel Lucent, Samsung and Huawei gained key contracts.

Maravedis’ upcoming report on worldwide equipment shipments presents a plethora of metrics for computing vendor market shares. We believe that innovation in the CPE market was a key driver for the BWA industry last year, and a special emphasis was therefore put on analyzing terminal market trends in the report.

The average price of a mobile WiMAX device in 2008 was US$145, and by year’s end the cost had dropped much lower: USB dongles were sold at prices between US$60-70 for high volumes.

Mobile WiMAX devices shipped in 2008 were mainly indoor units. 40% of mobile WiMAX devices had embedded VoIP capabilities and about 7% had other advanced functionalities such as WiFi. USB dongles accounted for 34% of total shipments and were operating in the 2.3GHz and 2.5GHz spectrums almost exclusively. Buyer pressure has continued to erode selling prices of mobile WiMAX devices; several operators rolled out low-end indoor units to satisfy the needs of price-sensitive consumers. 13% of shipments were simple modems with one single Ethernet port and no other functionalities.

Maravedis has very closely surveyed CPE and infrastructure vendors, chipset suppliers, ODMs and operators in order to provide an accurate picture of the BWA market in 2008. Particularly, we systematically used cross-reference techniques in order to assess the accuracy of the figures we have been provided with. For instance, chipset vendor disclosed shipments were confronted with ODM and OEM terminal vendors shipments and operators subscriber additions.

The dependencies between players in the different stages of the value chain offer thus a formidable chance to check figures in a variety of manners and assess their accuracy. This methodology is possible thanks to our outreach to the entire BWA community, including operators and ODMs. In particular, our 4GCounts service, a unique database maintained by experienced analysts, grounds our analysis to real world deployments and gives us access to over 200 operators worldwide.

CLICK HERE for more info on our upcoming report: "WiMAX and Broadband Wireless Access Equipment Market Analysis, Trends and Forecasts, 2009-2014"

For more information you can contact the author at bilel@maravedis-bwa.com

Copyright © 2009 by Maravedis Inc. All Rights Reserved.
No reproduction without consent.



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