Analyst: Mobile services driving global telecom, datacom markets

“Expect a slowdown in the Americas, but for a change, Europe will be in the telecom capex driver’s seat this year,” adds Stéphane Téral, principal analyst for mobile infrastructure and carrier economics at Infonetics Research. “We’re forecasting global carrier capex to rise 4%, with EMEA as the growth engine despite unabated low-single-digit revenue declines all across Europe. After waiting for so many years to upgrade their networks, Europe’s ‘Big 5 -- Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, and Vodafone -- have decided it’s time to take the plunge.” Also among the new report's top highlights: -- To avoid falling into the role of pipe provider, many service providers are deploying or weighing new architectural options such as caching/content delivery networks, distributed BRAS/BNG, next-gen central offices, distributed mini data centers, and video optimization. -- Software-defined networks (SDNs) and network functions virtualization (NFV) have the attention of nearly all service providers, who are on the long road to widespread deployments. -- Big Data is becoming more manageable: Operators are leveraging subscriber and network intelligence to support marketing and loyalty strategies, churn management, and automation/optimization of networks using SDN and NFV. -- Cloud service, mobility, BYOD, and virtualization are the top trends driving enterprise networking and communication technology spending, with North America leading the way.

Matthias Machowinski, co-author of the report and Infonetics’ directing analyst for enterprise networks, concludes, “Economic expansion in mature economies and falling unemployment in Europe is driving stronger growth in enterprise telecom and datacom expenditures this year. We expect the network infrastructure segment to be the main beneficiary of growing investments, followed by security. The communication segment will likely have another challenging year, as companies evaluate their deployment strategy going forward.”

Learn more about the report.