A recent report by In-Stat made the rounds today and came to land in my Inbox. The report was titled, "Big Pipes—The Global Market for Cellular/WiMAX Backhaul", but it was the title of the e-mail that caught my eye: "Growth in Mobile Data Triples Backhaul Capacity Demands". I knew from having read Cisco's own VNI Forecast that mobile traffic was growing extremely rapidly, but "triple" is one of those words that you just don't hear that much around here anymore, at least not since the "bubble" days.
In the report, In-Stat notes that "operators are deploying EV-DO 2000, HSPA/HSPA+, WiMAX, and LTE to meet the growing demand for high speed mobile data."
And Frank Dickson, In-Stat’s VP of Mobile Internet rightly observes, “It does an operator no good to install a base station with 7.2 Mbps capacity if the backhaul is limited to 4.5 Mbps.”
Obviously such a rapid and extreme build out holds great challenges for mobile operators in terms of resources, logistics, and costs. And I was thinking of this monumental challenge in light of another article I read citing an IDC study that showed how, with voice revenues declining, operators are relying more and more on data revenues to keep ARPU up. However, there's been no correlation between higher data speeds and greater ARPU.
So what is the motivation for 3.5 and 4G networks? How can operators keep up with demand and minimize customer churn without running themselves right out of business? Is the answer in the billing plans, the services, the network, or all of the above?
