Trend towards increased site sharing
Site sharing
Mobile operators around the world are moving to innovative business models in order to focus their capital spending on their core business; network development. Over the past years there is a clear trend toward sharing site infrastructure and towers.
The economic benefits of tower sharing are compelling, ABI Research predicts that multiple regions of the world will migrate toward a higher level of tower sharing, as well as infrastructure sharing.
There are roughly 1,730,000 macrocell sites worldwide according to ABI research.
Microdata Telecom is focused on infrastructure equipment such as RF filters for all site sharing scenarios. Our engineers are well experiences in solutions that enables sharing of all bands. Below a summary of sharing by region in the world.
Site sharing trend by region
North America
In North America, shared networks and are currently rare due to competitive reasons, but many industry insiders expect the capital savings to drive operators to look more closely at sharing network equipment, as the savings expects to be hundreds of thousands of dollars per site.
India/Acia Pacific/Mea
In India, there are relatively larger cost advantages than in any other region although the site costs are lower. Innovative business models which means free up capital has become popular in the area and an additional reason is the constant need of attention and maintenance of back up power systems as electrical power is unreliable.
The European market has a very high degree of network sharing. European operators have a highly competitive environment, yet and different from the North Americas operators, they have invented ways to keep their proprietary information confidential, and differentiate their services, while simultaneously sharing sites.
One reason for this close cooperation lies in the high cost of building out a typical site in Europe. In a metropolitan environment, a complete tower site outfitted with radio gear can cost between $200,000 and $1 million, and even in a rural environment the legal costs associated with approving a cell site can reach $100,000. As a result, the mobile operators choose to share infrastructure in rural areas, where capacity is less important than coverage.
(Source: ABI Report)
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