The Dell’ (News 
- Alert)Oro Group is a networking and telecommunications research company based out of Redwood City, Calif. The company provides a wide variety of market research to multiple industries as well as offers in-depth, objective research and analysis so that businesses can make informed, strategic decisions.
Today on February 20, 2013, the Dell’Oro Group revealed that between the fourth quarter of 2011 and 2012, the wireless packet core market revenue grew by 25 percent. This was mostly due to the significant expansion of the Evolved Packet Core (EPC).
A little history;
The GSM architecture relies on circuit-switching (CS). This means that circuits are established between the calling and called parties throughout the telecommunication network. This circuit-switching mode can be seen as an evolution of the "two cans and a string". In GSM, all services are transported over circuit-switches telephony principally, but short messages (SMS) and some data is also seen.
In GPRS, packet-switching (PS) is added to the circuit-switching. With this technology, data is transported in packets without the establishment of dedicated circuits. This offers more flexibility and efficiency. In GPRS, the circuits still transports voice and SMS. This means that the core network is composed of two domains: circuit and packet.
In the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS) or 3G, the dual-domain concept is kept on the core network side. Some network elements have evolved but the concept remains very similar. When designing the evolution of the 3G system, the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) community decided to use Internet protocol (IP) as the go-to way to transport all services. It was therefore agreed that the EPC would not have a circuit-switched domain anymore and that the EPC should be an evolution of the packet-switched architecture used in GPRS/3G.
Further, the Evolved Packet Core is the core network of the Long Term Evolution (LTE (News - Alert)) system.
Chris DePuy, analyst of wireless packet core at Dell-Oro Group said in a statement, "Since the emergence of Long-Term Evolution (LTE) a couple years ago, hundreds of Service Providers around the world have awarded EPC vendor contracts to companies such as Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco Systems, Ericsson, Huawei, Nokia Siemens, Samsung (News - Alert) and ZTE. While we expect more EPC contracts to be awarded, much of the vendor landscape for LTE-focused networks has been settled. In the near future, we expect that important market transitions providing new opportunity for vendors will involve Software Defined Networking and virtualized computing architectures, consolidation of WiFi (News - Alert) traffic to service packet core networks, and LTE network optimization to deliver Voice over LTE (VoLTE)."
According to Dell’Oro Group, some of the key takeaways from the quarter are:
- Ericsson achieved top ranking in the overall market by revenue; Huawei achieved top ranking by licenses shipped
- Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) and Samsung are benefitting from the industry transition towards Evolved Packet Core (EPC), taking significantly greater share in EPC than their share in the Traditional Packet Core segment
- Overall market pricing was stable in the quarter.
Edited by
Jamie Epstein
