Mobile operators must fix weakest link or lose customers: Tellabs

Mobile operators must fix weakest link or lose customers: Tellabs: Page 2 of 2

By Edwin Yapp August 14, 2013

Fibre to the rescue?

An analyst Digital News Asia spoke to concurred in general with the Tellabs-sponsored study, noting that the exponential increase of data consumed will force MNOs to likely use a combination of data management tools and network investment to cope.

Clement Teo (pic), senior analyst with Forrester Research Asia in Singapore, said that besides using fibre backhaul, operators could also implement content delivery networks (CDNs), wide area network (WAN) accelerators and high compression software to help ease the data demand.

“They could also look at price tiering for different volumes of data traffic in order to make data consumption more equitable among their users,” he said in an interview.

Beyond these methods, Teo conceded that most effective way to alleviate mobile backhaul demand is to begin the ‘fiberisation’ of mobile base stations. Fiberisation is the equipping of base stations with fibre access in order that data may be transported back to the MNO’s data centre.

Asked what were some of the challenges facing MNOs in the region as far as fiberisation is concerned, Teo said cost would be a major hurdle.

“The deployment and manpower costs are definitely challenges,” Teo said. “Besides this, owners granting access to work done is another big challenge especially in metropolitan areas such as those in Singapore [and Kuala Lumpur].”

Teo said in countries like Indonesia, where fibre rollout in vast geographical areas is a real challenge physically, the focus should be on building out where business demands are and to have rock-solid business cases for rolling out in those areas.

“Indonesia has only has five big cities to worry about as the bulk of businesses is concentrated there,” Teo said. “So the focus is on serving customers where there are real business needs.”

Tellabs’ Wong said MNOs today are still able to do something about the situation, but they must act now to ensure they won’t face worse problems later.

“Today, MNOs are taking steps to transform their backhaul by swapping equipment from the very traditional microwave technology to newer technologies such as Ethernet-based microwave, but this is in varying degrees of progress," he said.

Wong pointed out that the key is not to just add capacity, but to also add intelligence into the backhaul networks.

“We’re moving into an all IP-world and MNOs must transform their legacy circuit-switched system to IP-based systems,” he said. “Other methods include resource sharing and the better aggregation of data and routing, so that better backhaul efficiencies can be achieved.”

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