Description

The global LTE, LTE-U, LTE-M test equipment market is estimated to reach $2974 million from 2017 to 2022, due to adoption of LTE-M, LTE-LAA technologies. The LTE test equipment application is segmented into four: Research and Development, Manufacturing, Installation and Maintenance, Monitoring. Service providers, network equipment manufacturers, enterprises are the end users covered in the study. Regional scope is global including North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of the World. Base year of the study is 2017 with a forecast period from 2018 to 2023.

Consumer adoption of smartphones drives the demand for LTE test equipment. Consumer desire to surf the Web on their mobile device, make payments via their smartphone, and use mobile entertainment services, as well as the concept of bring your own device (BYOD), bring up the problem of limited speed and bandwidth that service providers (SPs) are struggling to solve. The number of Internet-connected devices is expected to reach 33 billion, and each household will have 15 connected devices by 2020. Nowadays, a large number of people have 2 or 3 mobile phones. According to CISCO, the global network data traffic reached 7.2 exabytes per month at the end of 2016, up from 4.4 exabytes per month at the end of 2015. 4G connections accounted for 69 percent of the mobile data traffic. End users' desire to access to high speed internet will increase the demand for test equipment. Carrier aggregation is used to increase the bandwidth of the network and therefore it increases the bit rate. It allows the devices to receive multiple different 4G signals at once and they don't have to be on the same frequency. This is driving demand for LTE test equipment globally in order to ensure interoperability, mobility and high service quality. LTE-Licensed Assisted Access (LAA) technology hit its peak in 2017 with increasing sale of test equipment driven by the commercial deployment of the technology. There will be high demand for R&D and monitoring solutions for LTE-U technologies. Driven by the impact of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), LTE Cat M1 is expected to witness constant demand throughout the forecast period. Megatrend IIOT will have a huge positive impact on this market.

Technology change is one of the challenges for the test equipment vendors. The technology keeps on evolving. They have to use the technology of today to design test equipment for the needs of tomorrow. For example, over the years transition happened from 3G to 4G to LTE to LTE-Advanced and more. Test equipment manufacturers have to design the equipment to be able to test both previous and latest versions enabled with a software update. LTE-Unlicensed technologies driven by high speed access and LTE-M driven by the volume of connected devices will primarily drive the communications test equipment market. Monitoring applications will face positive growth in the forecasted years as LTE technology is becoming mature. North America and Asia-Pacific will face decline while rest of the world and Europe will face growth in the coming years.