Aggressive fiber deployment in the past two years will limit...

mobile traffic will require high levels of ongoing infrastructure investment, the TIA report said. Spending on wireless data will increase overall spending on wireless services even as subscriber growth slows, it said. In the U.S., overall network infrastructure spending rose 23.7 percent year-over-year in 2011, helped by stimulus money, the report said. The 23.9 percent year-over-year increase in wireless infrastructure spending reflected wireless network upgrades and spending on LTE equipment, it said. However, the U.S. wireless market is now saturated, meaning further subscriber growth will be limited. That in turn could limit growth in overall wireless service spending, the report said. In that constrained environment, spending is shifting from voice to data, it said. The report expects voice to be used ultimately as a “low-cost promotion” to attract data users. The report also expects the M2M market to be one of the fastest-growing components of the data service market. The U.S. M2M spending on data is expected to overtake data spending by feature phone users in 2014, it said. Meanwhile, operators around the world are increasing their investments in cloud and M2M services, said Current Analysis’s Ron Westfall during the webinar. The communications industry is becoming more diversified, creating more opportunities for vertical markets like healthcare and public safety, he said. Cloud computing would open up the market to increased use of applications by more enterprises, he said. The fastest growing cloud service markets include Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, said economist Arthur Gruen with Wilkofsky-Gruen Associates, also the author of the TIA report. Enterprises are trading up to business ethernet as cloud computing and high-bandwidth connectivity to data centers are increasingly in demand, he said.