With an enormous amount of capital in play, the battle for LTE base station deployment has attracted both small and heavy hitting suitors alike.

Research firm In-Stat is forecasting that the total number of LTE macro base station deployments will reach 1.5 million in 2015, with Ericsson claiming a dominant #1 position while Huawei and Alcatel-Lucent battle it out for the second spot.

"Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent have become the early LTE leaders as a result of modernization contracts with Verizon and AT&T. Nokia-Siemens Networks recently claimed a prestigious contract win with Telecom Italia," says Chris Kissel, Analyst. "Huawei has won both A1 Telekom and T-Mobile in Austria. Samsung has been instrumental in the MetroPCS LTE launch and will be a major factor in South Korea as their LTE market comes online."

Recent research found the following:

- Ericsson is the clear market leader through 2014. However, in 2015, four cellular infrastructure vendors will realize $2 billion or more in revenues from LTE RAN equipment sales.
- In 2015, as Asia Pacific countries deploy LTE in earnest, Ericsson, Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent, and Nokia Siemens will all have at least 10% of newly deployed LTE macro base station shipments in 2015.
- In the years 2011-2015, LTE RAN revenues will grow at a CAGR of 41%.
- The top five vendors in global LTE EPC/router/gateways in 2012 will be Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Ericsson, Huawei, and Nokia Siemens Networks.
- Alcatel-Lucent will dominate the LTE packet backhaul infrastructure space in Central and Latin America in 2012, with Cisco and Ericsson assuming the #2 and #3 positions.