China's massive LTE rollouts will propel a 4% rise in global telecom capex for 2014, with spending on track to reach $354 billion, Infonetics projects.
Europe-wide network upgrades from Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom are also expected to contribute to the capex growth.
In 2013 telco capex increased 6.7% to $340 billion, but growth would have been higher were it not for the depreciation of currencies including the Japanese yen and the Indian rupee against the US dollar.
Expenditures on every type of network equipment barring TDM voice, video infrastructure, and CPE grew during the year.
But global telecom services revenue grew just 1.4% over the same period to $1.97 trillion, as a result of forex fluctuations and declining revenue from EMEA.
Infonetics expects telecom revenue to grow at a mere 1.7% CAGR for the period between 2013 and 2018, as saturation and competition intensify across every telecom market in the world.
APAC will remain the top revenue contributing region of the world, and will gain ground on second-placed EMEA through to 2018.