LTE infrastructure revenue was almost flat in Q2 2015 on a sequential basis (up just one per cent), but grew 10 per cent year-on-year. And IHS says the market will peak at $23 billion in 2015 before starting to decline “as a result of diminishing rollouts worldwide.”

The report revealed that Ericsson and Huawei shared the LTE infrastructure market share lead in Q2 2015, each claiming just over 20 per cent, and that 422 commercial LTE networks have been launched as of July 2015, 363 of which are of the frequency division duplex (FDD) variety.

What’s more, in Q2 2015, the worldwide macrocell mobile infrastructure market totaled $11.4 billion, up 2 per cent in Q2 2015 from the prior quarter, and up 2 percent year-over-year, “driven by strong 3G W-CDMA capacity projects in EMEA and unabated LTE activity in China”.

“This time around, W-CDMA alone pulled the 2G/3G market out of the dumps and contributed to the growth of the whole mobile infrastructure market. Substantial 3G deployments took place in Brazil, India, the Middle East, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam,” commented Stéphane Téral, research director for mobile infrastructure and carrier economics at IHS.

“Brazil kicked off a massive 2G GSM to 3G W-CDMA migration, and Thailand has ordered mobile operators to shut down their GSM network to re-use the spectrum for LTE,” he added.

Mobile infrastructure software is forecast by IHS to grow at a five year (2014-2019) compound annual growth rate of 8 percent.