Huawei LTE leadership grows in first half 2013

Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, has recently gained recognition for its leadership of the global LTE market at varying levels by three leading research companies, ABI Research, Dell'Oro and Informa Telecoms and Media, which taken together affirm Huawei to be in a leading position for commercial LTE contracts, market revenue share and 3GPP standards establishment. 

Long Term Evolution (LTE) networks have become widely accepted by most regional operators as the future of mobile broadband due to its unparalleled capacity and connectivity speeds. Informa Telecoms and Media has forecasted that the number of LTE subscriptions in the Middle East will increase to 15 million by the end of 2016. 

According to the GSA's Evolution to LTE report released in August 2013, 443 operators are investing in LTE and there are 200 commercial LTE networks in operation at this time. Of these, Huawei has won 196 commercial LTE network contracts and deployed 93 commercial LTE networks worldwide. Recent research from Informa analyzing LTE vendor positions in terms of commercial LTE contract share, concludes that Huawei accounts for 40% of awarded LTE network contracts; more than any other vendor. 

Mr. Shi Yaohong, President of Huawei Middle East, said: “We consider the consensus of such significant professionals to be a testament to our operator partners' endeavors as they continue open up increased market potential while and attracting end users with Huawei's No-Edge service experience.” 

Another important contributing factor to the growth of LTE during 2013 has been vendors' ongoing input in to 3GPP LTE Core Specification. According to the most recent data from 3GPP, ITU and other organizations, Huawei currently holds 90 key positions from Chairman and Board Member to rapporteur within numerous major international standards organizations—driving the improvement of standards within the industry. 

ABI Research, a leading market research and market intelligence firm, also recently provided an update to their report evaluating companies' contributions to the development of 3GPP technologies. The report covers contributions to WCDMA/HSPA, LTE, and EPC and the number of chairmanships, overall contributions, approved contributions, and discussion papers for 3GPP standards. According to ABI, Huawei is now positioned as one of the top two contributors to 3GPP standards. 

Just this past month Huawei also set an LTE industry first by helping build the world’s first 3.5GHz LTE-A trial network, demonstrating the network could support a max 770 Mb/s download speed by making use of cutting-edge LTE-A technologies like Carrier Aggregation (CA), Coordinated Multi-Point (CoMP) and Cloud BB (Baseband).

From the start Huawei has featured prominently when it comes to LTE partnerships in the Middle East. The company worked with top operators to deploy the region's first ever LTE commercial networks in Saudi Arabia and UAE, and has already linked with additional operators in Oman, Kuwait and Bahrain on other LTE-related projects.