Survey Sez 08/20/12

Tower-top RF electronics, consisting of active antennas, remote radio heads and tower-mounted amplifiers, will account for an increasing share of the base station market as LTE rolls out and distributed base stations become the norm, notes ABI Research. Ericsson, NSN, Alcatel-Lucent and Huawei Technologies currently account for about half of the total market, but new entrants include Comba Telecom in the TMA segment along with Andrew and AceAxis for RRH. Smaller merchant manufacturers of these products probably will need to participate in all three segments in some capacity to be successful…A Web-based ISPreview.co.uk survey of more than 1,000 U.K. Internet users found that 64 percent never would return to a broadband ISP that previously caused them problems; 78 percent said they would be “unwilling” to sacrifice service quality for cheaper access. Respondents also ranked Virgin Media as their operator of choice, followed by BT, Sky Broadband, O2, TalkTalk and Orange…Here are some findings from a recent Infonetics Research report on IPTV deployment: most operators deliver linear broadcast TV over a pure IP network; the majority of IPTV service providers interviewed don’t support such video streaming services as YouTube, Hulu or Netflix; only a third of IPTV operators surveyed offer social networking capabilities for the TV; and subscription video on demand (S-VOD) is the money-maker among VOD offerings.