16 March 2009
Filed in Point-to-multipoint | Point-to-multipoint
Despite global economic worries, mobile operators are continuing to focus on today’s hot topic; LTE.
Verizon announced its plans at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona last month, and Vodafone made no less than three technical announcements at the same show. Looking at what these operators are discussing, it’s clear that while the next-gen services they are anticipating are important, it’s the infrastructure ecosystem that is top of mind.
The obvious enthusiasm for LTE from the operators at the show this year was perhaps a bit of a surprise for some who may have thought the focus would be about sweating their assets. Verizon is planning on rolling out an LTE network over two cities by the end of the year; Vodafone made three infrastructure announcements, including its plan to include Ethernet microwave as part of its backhaul strategy. Yet despite this operator eagerness to move forward with planning LTE networks, there was very little in terms of innovative new products and solutions from the backhaul vendor community.
The lack of important product news about how next generation networks will actually be deployed was mirrored by a lack of information about how the backhaul network is going to cope. There appears to be an assumption that there’s plenty of fibre in the ground for backhauling the traffic and it will be both available and affordable, yet in the majority of cases this clearly won’t be the case. Given the first large-scale LTE deployment is less than 700 days away now, the industry needs to look seriously at its long-term roadmap for sustainable backhaul. Spectrum isn’t an infinite resource that will be freely available so new deployments will need to be as spectrally efficient as possible if this new technology is ever to deliver on its promise.
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