The overall Wireless Packet Core market grew more than 17% during the third quarter of 2013 versus the year-ago period, according to a new report from Dell’Oro Group.
Huawei, Ericsson, Cisco and Nokia Solutions and Networks were the top revenue-producing vendors in the overall market. In the faster-growing Evolved Packet Core (EPC) segment, Alcatel-Lucent joined Ericsson and Huawei in the top three vendor list.
Dell’Oro said the Evolved Packet Core (EPC) market is changing in three ways:
- Regions outside the North American LTE market are now driving EPC results, allowing a larger set of vendors to compete in the worldwide market. We expect EPC spending to accelerate in Europe and in China in coming quarters.
- New Network Function Virtualization (NFV) technology furnished by leading vendors is now being trialed by operators. We expect that in 2014 and beyond, operators will begin deploying NFV EPC systems.
- Additional services are being added along with EPC core networks, including Voice over LTE (VoLTE) and Rich Communication Services (RCS). These new systems will create additional vendor decisions for Service Providers as their networks are enhanced.
“Network Function Virtualization (NFV) means vendors can sell software-only telecom core network systems,” explained Chris DePuy, Vice President of Wireless Packet Core Research at Dell’Oro Group. “These new systems will run on top of data center-class servers, effectively matching the features and performance of systems that were previously available as hardware-based systems.”