Survey Sez

London-based Informa Telecoms & Media says small cells will outnumber all macrocells globally during the fourth quarter and that femtocells (aka residential small cells) alone will outnumber all macrocells shortly afterwards in 1Q13. Korea’s SK Telecom successfully started rolling out the world’s first LTE small-cell deployment, while AT&T, Sprint and China Mobile have committed to 3G small-cell services. Verizon Wireless plans to deploy LTE public-access small cells in the future, while Sprint will cut over LTE designs at the end of the year. The group says femtocells constitute more than 80 percent of the 4.6 million small cells currently deployed globally across 41 operators, compared to 5.6 million conventional macrocells. By the end of this year, there will be 6.4 million small cells – 86 percent of which will be femtocells – thus outnumbering the predicted 6 million macrocells worldwide…Latin America will account for 51 million 4G subscribers by the end of 2017, notes Maravedis-Rethink, and LatAm operators are faced with the challenge of monetizing their network investments and making profits in low-ARPU mobile markets while MVNOs and OTT players are threatening their revenues. As such, multimode devices will be “crucial” to market adoption. WiMAX operators have expressed concern that there are too few WiMAX devices to satisfy their needs, and they now are establishing migration strategies toward TD-LTE…The hospitals, physicians, clinics and insurance providers that make up U.S. healthcare system will be spending more than $69 billion on telecom services during the next six years, according to the Insight Research Corporation. Spending will grow at a compounded rate of 9.7 percent during the forecast period, increasing from $9.1 billion in 2012 to $14.4 billion in 2017.