With a flurry of new spectrum, new carriers being brought to the wireless market and new phones and applications finally giving people a reason to use 3G, times should pretty good for equipment suppliers. They will need basestations, core network upgrades and substantial backend data capacity. Not to mention the boon for their suppliers (such as chipmakers) who will also benefit from this renaissance.
The difference may be that this second boom may be dominated by new entrants like ZTE and Hauwei who may have substantial price advantages and the traditional telecom players will feel the price pressure. You would think that the fortunes for the traditional players like Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent, Motorola but so far those companies are generally flat and the news usually bad. There is a bit of a bright spot though, a quick glance at Google’s communication equipment index shows an upward trend (including a sharp jump up on July 21 while the S&P dropped) indicating that the market may be starting to buy into this inevitable upgrade.
What will be interesting will be which technologies are deployed and for what purpose. A lot of major carriers have announces plans for LTE, WiMAX is very much in the game, CDMA will have a future for a while as a mature 3G technology and (since hell may be freezing over) TD-SCDMA may commercially launch in time for the Olympics in China. It will also be worth watching to see if the new entrants get into the voice game, or use their spectrum for data-only applications, such as WISPs or selling data terminals like Amazon’s Kindle.
I hope that this all means the next five years will produce a bonaza of bandwidth, applications, competition and brilliant new business models.
