Wireless backhaul to go next-generation by 2012: IDC

Research firm IDC predicts there will be more than three million base stations and more than 1.8 million cell sites in the Asia Pacific (including Japan) carrier network by 2012. This represents a growth of 24.3 per cent and 10.7 per cent respectively from 2008.

This is the based on the firm's continuous research of the region's carrier network equipment market.

About half of these sites will be connected by fibre through ethernet. Urban 3G/high-speed packet access (HSPA) base stations will be linked by fibre by 2011 in most markets in the region. IDC also expects that almost all urban WiMAX and long term evolution (LTE) base stations will be connected by fibre by 2012. Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) microwave and fixed WiMAX will be used to provide up to 300 megabits per second backhaul in areas where fibre is not available.

"A number of leading mobile carriers in the Asia/Pacific, in countries such as Australia, Hong Kong, India, Japan, South Korea, Japan, Philippines and Singapore, are already starting to connect parts of their metropolitan 3G/HSPA backhauls with carrier Ethernet over fibre," said Bill Rojas, research director for IDC's Asia/Pacific telecommunications research.

"The main driver of this transformation is the need for mobile operators to provide scalable, high-bandwidth, Web 2.0 video and audio content, and Internet access services for both mobile and fixed users in incremental CAPEX (capital expenditure) outlays," said Rojas.

Five key challenges

Mobile operators in the region are faced with five key challenges that are driving the need for more bandwidth to the end-user devices (downlink and uplink):

1. Enhancing coverage spanning dense urban, suburban, and rural areas.

2. In markets where pre-paid services is dominant, value-added data services need to be geared to lower-speed bandwidth while post-paid centric markets must typically target premium value-added services.

3. Potentially exponential increases in data traffic once higher speeds are enabled will not necessarily translate into higher data average revenue per user (ARPU).

4. Declining voice ARPU means that data ARPU must be increased in the long-term.

5. Network OPEX (operating expense) will need to be carefully contained so that it does not grow disproportionately with traffic demand growth.

The combination of the third and fourth challenges means that operators need to offer scalable bandwidth but at tariff schedules that resemble a combination of flat-rate plateaus with specific usage caps. Without the scalable bandwidth in the backhaul, operators will not be able to balance OPEX and CAPEX, and could find themselves in the non-competitive situation of not being able to offer new multimedia-rich wireless services because of incremental bandwidth constraints.

"Without such a transformation of the wireless backhaul, the promise of 3.5G and 4G systems such as LTE will not be feasible. The emergence of bandwidth-hungry devices such as Apple's 3G iPhone and Google's Android-operating system-based devices means that mobile operators need to begin the transformation to NGN in the backhaul urgently in order to avoid being branded as obsolete," Rojas said.