Backhaul-on-Demand: Ideal for Operators Looking to Avoid Backhaul Crunch

For the last year, we’ve seen a relentless flood of news reports centered on the subject of overloaded mobile networks.

 

And today – at the 2010 Mobile World Congress (News - Alert) kicked off in Barcelona – an Analysys Mason analyst reportedly used his speaking time to stress the urgency of the situation, as data traffic surges on mobile networks as a result of mobile broadband sales. What’s more, he even suggested a way to deal with it.  

 

Operators need to find economical ways to deal with the  urgently need to deal with the resulting backhaul crunch, by offloading data traffic onto WiFi (News - Alert) hotspots and femtocells and by finding economical ways to expand capacity at macrocell and microcell sites, said Philip Bates, a senior manager at Analysys (News - Alert) Mason, who is speaking at the event.

 

“We believe that this combination of factors creates a unique opportunity for incumbent fixed-line operators and their altnet competitors to offer shared packet-based backhaul services,” Bates said. “Backhaul-on-demand, as we call it, can be a win-win situation for both the buyer and the seller. Mobile operators eliminate the risk of over- or under-dimensioning their backhaul networks as a result of errors in forecasting future levels of data traffic, avoid the capital expenditure associated with a move to packet-based backhaul, and safeguard their quality of service at shared sites by means of a service level agreement with the backhaul provider. Meanwhile, backhaul providers secure large, long-term revenue opportunities, and can mitigate the traffic forecasting risk to some extent through their ability to aggregate the traffic from multiple operators at low incremental cost.”