Annual fronthaul link deployment is expected to hit 12 million by 2020 due to completion of initial LTE rollouts and capacity increases via LTE-A, according to LightCounting Market Research. The market research firm forecasts the fronthaul optical transceiver sales to grow to more than $1 billion by 2020 - ten times greater than those of backhaul devices.
Gigabit speed fiber-optic fronthaul systems are a key ingredient of high-performance mobile broadband networks," said John Lively, Principal Analyst at LightCounting. "The fronthaul market segment will consume more than 17 million optical transceivers in 2015, with a market value of $540 million. Transceiver suppliers will have to be nimble to capitalize on this opportunity, however, because product mix will change considerably over the next five years".
