After a year that saw an estimated 9.1 percent reduction in capital spending in North America by large carriers such as AT&T, many of those companies are planning small increases in 2010, analysts say.

For those carriers, capital expenditures—the spending companies do to upgrade physical assets, such as telecom networks—fell from $61.6 billion to an estimated $56 billion during the recession last year in North America, according to Catharine Trebnick, IP data-networking analyst at Avian Securities LLC in Boston.

She is projecting that capital expenditures will grow a modest 2 percent this year, to $57.1 billion, which will have a direct impact on an industry that still employs more than 50,000 people in North Texas.

“Last year, everybody cut back so (much),” she said. “You’re also seeing a shift. There will be less spending on wireline and more spending for preparation for mobile broadband (services).”

Added Jake Saunders, a Singapore-based vice president for forecasting at ABI Research: “For 2010, (it) will be up incrementally on 2009. There was a holdback on spending in 2009.”

Spending on telecom equipment is done largely by five big players: Dallas-based AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Qwest, and Verizon. All told, AT&T and Verizon account for 61 percent of North American capital expenditures, according to Trebnick.

Both AT&T and Verizon declined comment about 2010 capital-spending plans, citing planned earnings releases in coming weeks in which they will unveil numbers both for actual 2009 capital expenditures and projections for 2010.

Trebnick estimates that AT&T’s capital spending will grow incrementally this year after falling 11.2 percent last year.

New York-based Verizon, which employs 14,000 in North Texas, will spend marginally less this year after cutting its capital spending by less than 1 percent in 2009, according to Trebnick.

Wireline to Wireless

Both analysts and people within the industry say major voice, video, and data carriers such as AT&T are increasingly shifting their spending from their wireline infrastructure to their wireless networks. The goals, experts say, is to pull in new subscribers for wireless data plans, upgrade existing voice-only customers to data offerings, and sell new types of devices, such as the Kindle, an electronic-reading device from Amazon.com.

One North Texas company making hay off the wireless push is Richardson’s AirWalk Communications, which makes a range of equipment for wireless networks. Among other things, AirWalk makes a gadget known as a femtocell, a device used in homes and small offices for connecting wireless phones and similar devices with the rest of the network.

Serge Pequeux, AirWalk’s president and CEO, said 2009 was “our best year ever. We expanded in sales and shipments…(and) 2010 is looking to be better.”

Pequeux said the company last year added seven employees, and it could bring aboard as many as 20 more staffers this year.

“We see the market expanding for smaller products requiring less space” and with lower energy requirements, he said. “We see the market moving toward data in a big way. Customers are buying more smartphones, which require connections to the network on the data side. Our products fit that need.”

Pullback on U-verse?

The increased focus on wireless services means AT&T likely will spend less on its U-verse bundled service of phone, Internet, and video for consumers, according to Trebnick. In a research note, she said that will “adversely impact” large makers of telecom gear such as France’s Alcatel-Lucent, which employs about 1,830 people locally, and Ericsson, which has closer to 2,200 staffers in North Texas.

But Jeff Kagan, an independent telecom industry analyst in the Atlanta area, said providers of bundled services still have much work to do because a fair chunk of the population still doesn’t have access to those offerings.

“There’s still plenty of money to spend,” he said.