WCDMA vendor revenue increased 8% between 4Q08 and 1Q09, and is up 61% year-over-year, mainly due to China's 3G rollouts and smartphone - and data card-driven upgrades in North America and Europe, reports Infonetics Research. The research house also noted that Ericsson increased its revenue market share in 1Q09, retaining the top spot for macrocell RAN equipment.

"The mobile infrastructure market was marked in the first quarter of 2009 by steep declines across the board except for W-CDMA and packet core equipment, strong 3G rollouts in China, and a major vendor shakeout. Between China Mobile, China Unicom, and China Telecom, a total of 59,000 3G base transceiver stations (BTS) were deployed in China alone in 1Q09, helping Huawei and ZTE gain significant share at the expense of most of the other major players in the RAN equipment market. Huawei is now the size of Alcatel-Lucent in this segment, and ZTE doubled its RAN revenue market share over just the last 4 quarters, solidifying its spot on the top 5 vendor leaderboard," said Infonetics Research's Principal Analyst for Mobile and FMC Infrastructure.

Despite the global economic turmoil, mobile packet core and mobile softswitching (soft MSC and wireless media gateway) deployments continue to be the brightest spots of the mobile infrastructure market, driven by an unstoppable migration to IP networks. Worldwide home location register (HLR) revenue dropped 21% in 1Q09, typical for a first quarter but exacerbated by the GSM pause.