There's no place like home. Thanks to a dominant market share in its home country of China, Huawei ranked first in cloud-native evolved packet (EPC) revenue in the third quarter, according to a report.
Ranking first in Dell'Oro Group's latest EPC report is a piece of good news for Huawei, as most of its telecommunications gear has been banned in the U.S. and other countries due to security concerns.
Dell'Oro Group's report said that Huawei was able to climb over Ericsson for the top spot in the revenue rankings based on strong subscriber growth in China, which included more than 40 million LTE subscribers.
According to a previous Dell'Oro Group report, cloud-native network functions virtualization for EPC accounted for 19% of the first-quarter revenues. Service providers based in the U.S. are currently driving the initial EPC growth while carriers in China, South Korea, Japan, Scandinavia and the Middle East will start to ramp up their deployments in the near-term.
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“Service providers are moving aggressively to deploy cloud-native EPC for 5G network launches,” said David Bolan, senior analyst at Dell’Oro Group, in a.prepared statement. “We see examples of these EPC deployments with the recent announcements of 5G network launches in Korea and the anticipated launch by AT&T in the US by the end of the year.”
Nokia came in third behind Ericsson, while ZTE rebounded from the end of its U.S. ban to place fourth overall.
Nokia announced today that Telenor was deploying its cloud-native mobile core platform to provision Telenor's mobile operations across Scandinavia.
In the third quarter, the Asia-Pacific region had the largest share of EPC session shipments, followed by Europe, the Middle East and Africa, North America and Latin America.