The mobile infrastructure market is growing at its fastest pace since 2004, as operators rush to beef up their networks in the face of surging data usage.
Total vendor revenues grew 25% year-on-year in the second quarter, Dell'Oro estimates, with W-CDMA/HSPA and CDMA/EV-DO sales accounting for nearly 70% of this gain.
And Dell'Oro expects 2H11 to be another strong period for the sector, with wireless capex in North America alone set to increase 7%.
The research firm points to growing smartphone adoption as a key driver behind operators' increased investments, noting that the devices now account for 35% of the installed mobile phone base in North America.
Ericsson, Huawei, and Nokia Siemens are the vendors with the largest share of the mobile infrastructure market on a trailing four-quarter basis.
Separately, Dell'Oro today projected that the global optical transport DWDM equipment market grew 30% year-on-year to $1.9 billion in Q2.
Sales grew across across all regions during the quarter. Demand has now been unabated for four straight quarters.
Dell'Oro estimates that Huawei has the lion's share of this market, with 18%, followed by Ciena with 15%, Alcatel-Lucent with 14% and Fujitsu with 9%.