According to news reports, the Metro Ethernet Forum (News - Alert) says that providing guidelines for both wireless operators and their wholesale partners can make the whole wireless backhaul process easier “as operators migrate from TDM-based backhaul to Ethernet/IP-based backhaul to support 4G/LTE (News - Alert).”

Industry observer Sean Buckley wrote that wireless operators who deliver the bandwidth required for 4G/LTE say that wireless backhaul is “the biggest challenge in operating cost in the industry," citing Nan Chen, president of the MEF (News - Alert), who told Buckley that costs run from $1-$2 billion “in just the U.S. for Ethernet circuits."

The Forum supports carrier Ethernet for wireless backhaul, contending in a recent white paper that it provides “scale, reach, control, reliability, performance guarantees, bandwidth on demand, CoS, QoS, time to market, risk mitigation, predictability & ease of implementation.”

In additon, metro Ethernet’s characteristics and reliability “are similar to traditional carrier transport technologies like SONET,” improving on traditional architectures by the fact that edge terminations “scale easily,” and “the economic model for service delivery proves itself time and time again.”

As TIA (News - Alert) 2011 wrote last year, “on the plus side, Ethernet backhaul has the potential to substantially reduce transport costs, which will be critical as high-bit rate, low revenue-per-bit data traffic increases. Ethernet also is more scalable than TDM, which will be critical to accommodate ongoing traffic growth.”

The Forum’s Mobile Backhaul Initiative has an integrated suite for 4G/LTE, and according to Buckley, Forum officials say “it can help wireless operators save up to 25 percent on wireless backhaul.”

All this is necessary, Buckley says, since a single class was sufficient for backhauling TDM voice traffic, but nowadays there’s much more to traffic than just voice, so both wireless operators and their wholesale partners will have to designate high-priority and best-effort traffic.