Mobile Backhaul Equipment Market Growing Fast, with No Letup in Sight

Mobile backhaul equipment investments jumped a healthy 19% in 2008 to $4.6 billion worldwide, and revenue is set to explode over the next 5 years and beyond, reports Infonetics Research. The report also said that the most quickly changing technologies between 2008 and 2013 are Ethernet microwave and Ethernet copper and fiber. In all the major world regions, operators will gradually shift to Ethernet backhaul, although it will be a slower shift in Asia Pacific and Central/Latin America, as a higher proportion of overall mobile traffic remains voice for a longer period.

"Data usage on mobile networks is causing a traffic explosion on backhaul networks, exacerbated by the popularity of bandwidth-hungry mobile phone applications. An AT&T executive this month said 50% of the data traffic on AT&T's mobile backhaul network is iPhone-generated, despite the fact that only a few million of their 78 million cellular subscribers are iPhone users. Pretty soon, likely by 2010, data traffic will surpass voice traffic on mobile networks. Carriers everywhere are increasing the bandwidth on their backhaul networks to handle this exploding IP data traffic, and the most efficient, cost-effective way to do that is to transition from TDM to packet IP/Ethernet, which is driving the mobile backhaul equipment market," said Michael Howard, Infonetics Research's co-founder and principal analyst for carrier networks.

Richard Webb, Infonetics Research's directing analyst for microwave, added: "Roughly 60% of backhaul cell site connections are microwave in most regions of the world and this is increasing, making microwave the largest and fastest growing piece of the mobile backhaul market. Even North America, a lesser adopter of microwave, is increasingly deploying it. Microwave's scalability of both economics and bandwidth has made it the dominant backhaul solution-and often the only viable one-for addressing the capacity imperative for mobile backhaul."

The report also noted that many factors are driving the shift to IP Ethernet backhaul; chief among them:

• Backhaul costs are rising
• The number of mobile broadband phone subscribers continues to increase, and is expected to pass the 1 billion mark in 2010
• Bandwidth usage is surging via EDGE, EV-DO, and HSPA, and will continue ramping with the coming new wave of HSPA+ upgrades, WiMAX, and LTE, each allowing mobile e-mail, calendar, data, and Internet access to popular applications like YouTube driving mobile video downloads, MP3 files, online gaming on handsets, application downloads, and P2P traffic

Posted to the site on 27th May 2009