In-Stat Report Finds WiMAX Pioneers Still Hold Dominant Market Share Position in 2006

According to In-Stat, while better known equipment vendors like Samsung, Nokia Siemens, and Motorola received extensive press coverage in 2006 due to their high-profile service provider wins, it was still the original market entrants - Alvarion, Aperto, Redline, and Airspan that held the dominant market positions. The high-tech market research firm does expect that will change as Sprint starts its network deployment. The company has not selected any of those early market pioneers as an infrastructure partner.

“While the early pioneers of WiMAX should lose their market share dominance over the next couple of years, they should continue to grow their revenues, benefiting from the overall growth of the market. These vendors continue to win larger contracts with higher profile service providers,” says Daryl Schoolar, In-Stat analyst.

Recent research by In-Stat found the following:

– At the end of 2006, there were 213.3k WiMAX subscribers, worldwide.
– Almost all of those subscribers were found in Eastern Europe, North Africa/Middle East, and the Asia/Pacific Region.
– Due to delays in 802.16e certification, In-Stat now believes the life cycle for 802.16d equipment will be longer than originally forecasted.

The research, “2006 WiMAX Equipment Market Share-Waiting to Sprint” (#IN0703882WBB), provides worldwide WiMAX equipment market shares for 2006. It includes total equipment market shares for 2006, market shares for base station revenues, market shares for both CPE revenue and shipments, and a subscriber forecast, broken out by region. Equipment includes base stations, gateways/modems, and laptop cards.