Posts Tagged ‘4g’
Friday, January 27th, 2012
There’s an interesting tidbit in AT&T’s most-recent quarterly earnings report. CEO Randall Stephenson pointed out that AT&T now has “80 percent of our total mobile data traffic on Ethernet backhaul.”
That doesn’t mean 80 percent of the sites have been upgraded, but more than the sites representing 80 percent of the traffic have been upgraded to Ethernet facilities. What isn’t so clear is what has happened to backhaul as a percentage of operating costs.
In the past, backhaul has represented as much as 30 percent of total operating costs for some operators, in some cases perhaps even more.
AT&T has advantages greater than most other mobile service providers, in that it has the biggest fixed network physical footprint of any mobile service provider in the U.S. market, meaning AT&T has the ability to use its own facilities for backhaul, rather than leasing Ethernet connections from other providers.
Tags: 3g, 4g, backhaul
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Friday, January 20th, 2012
Juniper Research predicts that mobile network operators will have to spend $840 billion globally on optimizing backhaul assets and adding capacity between 2011 and 2016.
Microwave will represent about 60 percent of the backhaul in 2016, Juniper Research predicts. Microwave backhaul will be driven by capacity needs in Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, the Indian Subcontinent and the rest of the Asia Pacific region.
By 2016, operator investments in the Far East and China will reach $233 billion, driven by fiber backhaul deployments.
In North America, Juniper predicts that optical fiber will overtake copper as the most widely used access technology.
Microwave’s share of mobile backhaul capacity in the Indian Subcontinent is set to reach almost 87 percent by 2016.
But backhaul capacity will not the only key concern mobile executives will be facing between now and 2016. Juniper Research also forecasts that mobile service providers face potential capital investment and operating costs that actually exceed revenues by about 2014, according to Juniper Research.
The problem is that profit margins are running between 15 percent and 20 percent, which means many service providers are at about break even.
By 2015, costs will exceed revenues slightly, and fall below capital and operating expense by about 2016. Mobile backhaul
Tags: 3g, 4g, backhaul
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Wednesday, January 4th, 2012
At least half a million base stations will be installed or upgraded for TD-LTE by the end of 2016, according to ABI Research. One way of looking at that statistic is that half a million base stations also will need Ethernet and megabit per second connections as well.
“It was only two years ago that nearly every WiMAX operator, including operators with unpaired TDD frequency spectrum, were planning to deploy WiMAX 2,” says Aditya Kaul, ABI Research practice director, mobile networks. “Today, almost all of them have switched plans and are deploying TD-LTE instead.”
TD-LTE is the Time-Division Duplex (TDD) variant of the fourth-generation (4G) Long Term Evolution (LTE) wireless standard. 4G base station upgrades
Tags: 4g, lte, TD-LTE
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