Skip to main content

Global Telecom Service Provider Investment

Infonetics Research released the second edition of its 2009 telecom Service Provider Capex, Opex, ARPU, and Subscribers report, which features analysis on how current economic conditions are impacting telecommunications markets -- by region and equipment segment.

"Global telecom service provider capital expenditures hit a plateau in 2008, marking the end of a 5-year investment cycle and the beginning of a 3-year disinvestment cycle, albeit a less dramatic one than what followed the great telecom crash of 2000," predicts Stephane Teral, principal analyst at Infonetics.

Capex will bottom down in 2010 and a new investment cycle will start in 2011, driven by 3G rollouts in India and Central and Latin America, the start of 3G rollouts in Africa, and a ramp-up in LTE deployments in Australia, Brazil, Western Europe, Japan, and North America.

Highlights of the Infonetics market study include:

- Worldwide, service providers spent $305 billion in 2008 on capital expenditure projects, such as network infrastructure upgrades.

- Global capex is forecast to decline at most 6 percent in 2009, mainly due to a significant capex shakeout in the Middle East and Africa, a weakening U.S. dollar, expected declines in the Brazilian real and Mexican peso, and delays in U.S. broadband stimulus funding.

- Infonetics anticipates a year-end bump up in capex, which could bring the overall capex decline in 2009 to less than 6 percent.

- Optical network hardware is a bright spot in today's tightened capex environment, with decent single-digit percent spending growth expected in 2009, despite currency devaluations.

- Mainly due to currency effects, worldwide service provider revenue is forecast to decline only very slightly in 2009, to $1.67 trillion, driven by mobile communication services, as consumers continue to hold on to their mobile services during tough economic times.

- Mobile infrastructure will continue to dominate total global telecom and datacom spending, followed by voice equipment.

- The world's 10 largest service providers (ranked in order by 2008 revenue) are AT&T, NTT, Verizon, Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, Vodafone, China Mobile, Telefonica, BT, and Sprint.

Popular posts from this blog

Frontier AI Peaked. Here's What Comes Next

The prevailing narrative around artificial intelligence (AI) has been one of relentless scale. Bigger models, bigger clusters, bigger budgets. The assumption, largely unchallenged until recently, was that raw parameter count translated directly into competitive advantage. New research from Omdia suggests it's time to retire that assumption. According to the latest market study by Omdia, parameter growth in frontier AI models has slowed to around 5 percent annually since 2021, a stark contrast to the more than hundredfold expansion seen between 2019 and 2021. Enterprise AI Market Development For executives who have been making infrastructure and investment decisions based on the assumption that AI would keep demanding ever-larger, ever-more-expensive hardware, this finding deserves serious attention. The race to the top of the model size leaderboard has, at least for now, plateaued. Crucially, Omdia's analysts are not reading this as an AI winter. Alexander Harrowell, senior pri...