2012 has been a solid year for AdvancedTCA (ATCA) blades and systems. VDC Research believes that 2012 will end up with an almost 20% growth in the ATCA blade market alone. Cellular build out around the world, particularly in developing nations such as China, and the jump to LTE in North America and Europe are driving this growth.  When you add in the acceleration of LTE deployments in 2013 to increase bandwidth that will satisfy...

Mobile telephony as we now know it has been with us since the early 1980s, and the infrastructure of cellular networks has evolved and changed significantly since the original analogue AMPS systems were first introduced. Although architectures have evolved there is still a clear separation between the mobile core and the Radio Access Network or RAN. As the technologies moved from analogue to digital, we added mobile data and stepped up...

Although building out a mobile cellular network has never been exactly “simple,” the complexities faced by today’s mobile providers are multifaceted. When considering network design, especially in the RAN (Radio Access Network), one must balance performance, capacity and economics. The traditional methodologies of creating “single purpose” base station configurations that require discrete hardware, supporting limited wireless...