Apple: UBS Telecom Survey Finds iPhone More ‘Sticky’

A team of analysts at UBS this morning have put together a group report they call the “Global Telecom Equipment Analyser,” with a survey of smart-phones and telecom equipment, which they hope to be “a consistent quantitative framework” for assessing trends in cellular.

One portion, a smartphone survey, was carried out by interviewing 515 consumers, most of whom were more “high end” types, they write.

The equipment part of the report was a survey of purchasing managers and other “senior executives in the networks” at 30 major cellular operators in Western Europe and North america.

The consumer survey found that Apple (AAPL) had the highest “retention rate,” by which they mean responses to the question, “which handset OEM they expect to next purchase a handset from.”

Apple’s retention was 89%, followed by Taiwan’s HTC (2498TW), and Research in Motion (RIMM) at 33%, down from 62% 18 months earlier.

Based on that survey, UBS rates phones based on Google’s (GOOG) “Android” operating system less “sticky,” as it claimed a retention rate in the survey of just 60%, and 31% of Android users indicate a willingness to move to Apple’s phone for the next purchase.

“Retention rates appear to be falling for most of the OEMs. The largest loser recently has been RIMM whose retention rate has dropped from 62% to 33% in 18 months. Relatively, Apple�s retention rates have held up incredibly well even as its market share has risen.”

Happily, in the equipment survey, 80% of respondents said they will spend more on capital investments in wireless over the next one to two years, most of them saying the macroeconomic concerns would not force them to cut back.

There’s an equal priority for investment in both backhaul portions of the network, and in the radio access network, the authors found. Both segments of cellular are felling pressure from increased traffic and numbers of users.

And more carriers are planning 4G wireless, or “Long Term Evolution” (LTE) network upgrades relative to a similar survey conducted last year:

For LTE, a larger proportion of respondents compared to last year now intend to roll-out LTE. Over 40% of the participants stated that they are already rolling-out and another c40% intend to roll-out in the future with 6% not intending to roll-out at all and 10% undecided. This compares to last year�s survey where c50% intended to roll-out and c50% were undecided.