Cisco has announced a proposed $2.9 billion acquisition of Starent Networks. This demonstrates its strategy to compete in mobile broadband infrastructure with 3G now, with the path laid for transition to LTE. It also follows on from Cisco’s often stated views about the steep growth curve that we can expect from mobile video in particular over the next 5 years.
The growth of smart phones and mobile internet devices such as netbooks have driven changes in how consumers use the mobile internet, Cisco said.
There has been speculation in the press about where this Cisco in relation to WiMAX, following its Navini purchase a couple of years ago. Sure. That’s another blogpost really – WiMAX has had some mixed assessments of late.
At Juniper Research though, we would take the whole LTE opportunity one stage further. First however let’s size the LTE market: we forecast 100 million LTE subscribers worldwide by 2014. This is only the beginning.
We can see long term (2014 and beyond) a range of consumer devices which could include games consoles and digital cameras with embedded LTE chipsets: Sony, for example, announced that network connectivity is one of 3 top priority actions.
Now we’re not saying this will happen tomorrow. Nor are we saying that all devices will have this connectivity – it will start with top of the range models. We are agreeing with Cisco that mobile internet (video) traffic trends are only going one way and that this will impact mobile broadband infrastructure big time. But we can also see the impact on devices that we’re all familiar with – and the exciting potential!
Tags: Cisco, LTE, mobile broadband, mobile data, mobile internet, Navini, Starent, video, wimax
