IDC predicts that there will be over 3 million basestations and over 1.8 million cell sites in the Asia Pacific region (including Japan – APAC) by 2012, representing a growth of 24.3% and 10.7% respectively from 2008. Approximately half of these sites will be connected to fiber through Carrier Ethernet. Urban 3G/High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) basestations will be linked to fiber by 2011 in most markets in the region. The research firm also expects that almost all urban WiMAX and Long Term Evolution (LTE) basestations will be connected to fiber by 2012. Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) microwave and fixed WiMAX will be used to provide up to 300 mbps backhaul in areas where fiber is not available.
“A number of leading mobile carriers in the Asia Pacific, in countries such as Australia, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Japan, Philippines, and Singapore, are already starting to connect parts of their metropolitan 3G/HSPA backhauls with Carrier Ethernet over fiber,” says 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 outlays.”
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):
- Enhancing coverage spanning dense urban, suburban, and rural areas.
- 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.
- Potentially exponential increases in data traffic once higher speeds are enabled will not necessarily translate into higher data average revenue per user (ARPU)
- Declining voice ARPU means that data ARPU must be increased in the long-term
- Network OPEX 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 noncompetitive 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,” adds Rojas.
IDC believes that in order to support high-speed wireless services, operators will need to build scalable all-IP backhaul which combines Carrier Ethernet and fiber distribution in the urban centers, as well as microwave backhaul and Long-Haul dense wavelength division multiplexing (LH DWDM).
Green IT will put additional pressure on radio access network (RAN) and backhaul designs to become more energy efficient which means that equipment vendors will need to balance computational power at the basestation versus that in the local exchanges and mobile switching centers. Basestations that have router functionality will be able to provide peer-to-peer communications within the network. The multitude of radio standards is also putting
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