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By now there’s no doubt about it: mobile operators need to get their backhaul networks in condition to meet the burgeoning market for anytime, anywhere data access. Backhaul, once considered the humdrum side of an operator’s network, has become the topic du jour now that the mobile phone customershave shifted to smartphones and are taking advantage of data-hungry services in a big way. Earlier this month, AT&T reported that its wireless data traffic has grown more than 5,000 percent over the past three years, largely due to smartphones, which are used by about 40 percent of its post-paid customer base. All operators have to contend with this growth, and quickly: smartphones should represent the vast majority (65%) of phones sold in the country by 2012, according to Creative Strategies, an analyst firm. Operators are taking steps to prepare their networks to meet the expected demand, and the process of identifying specific backhaul needs and configuring the best solutions will force companies to bring the backhaul problem to the forefront of their infrastructure and business planning. This is a closer look at the available options and considerations operators must keep in mind as they prepare to build out this part of their networks.

It’s too soon to say how well the first broadband stimulus fund awards will represent the awards that follow (they represent less than 10% of the first-round funds, and the rules may change for the second round), but given how publicly the White House touted these first picks, it would seem they’re intended to be exemplary, to some degree, of what the administration wants in an applicant.

Click here for the top 5 stimulus winner observations

21-May
Focus: 4G
Backhaul the Lifeline to 4G
Jennifer Pigg, VP, Enabling Technologies, Yankee Group

Yankee Group research shows that 50% of mobile network failures today can be traced back to problems in the backhaul.  That’s today – mostly voice, little data, almost no video on the mobile network.  Backhaul is not only a bottleneck, it’s a kluge bottleneck.  Service providers, unwilling to put their voice traffic at risk are leaving it on expensive TDM backhaul solutions and offloading data traffic to a parallel packet network.  In this session, we look at today’s dominant backhaul solutions and explain how the service providers will eat up CAPEX dollars and bleed profits if they do not move to more efficient solutions.  We also handicap the solutions available according to how stable we believe the solutions to be in terms of cost, performance, and management, particularly in terms of QoS and SLAs.

Sponsored by, CFN Services