Ovum’s Lively agrees that maybe it is worth
forcing an incremental uptake, but only if
the competition do likewise: “Where it gets
really interesting is if you’re in a competitive
market. You’ve just spent all this money on
infrastructure and so has your competitor.
Now you’re desperate to get people signed up.
So if your competitor starts to offer unlimited
data then it would be hard not to.”
And, in effect, that’s what we’re starting
to see, certainly with mobile broadband
offerings. The race to sign up customers is
a land grab exercise that the carriers will
recognise. With voice, coverage mattered
initially until it became ubiquitous, now the
carriers are looking towards network sharing.
There’s every chance that mobile broadband
backhaul capacity might indirectly become
an anecdotal issue among subscribers. Of
course, consumers won’t know or care about
Singaporean self-starter
Neil Montefiore, CEO M1, tells MCI why his firm moved off
leased lines and into self-provision.
“We started the project almost the day we launched
M1 Broadband, which is HSDPA 2.6 Mbps, but priced
so it was competitive with fixed line broadband.
We thought initially it would be the roadwarrior
market. But we were completely wrong. People are
using it as their personal broadband, even though
at home in a lot of cases they had fixed broadband.
They’d still take the wireless broadband, because
they could take it wherever they went because it is
more convenient and strangely enough they didn’t
use it when they got home. Which is a bit like what
happened with phones.
Most operators launching broadband are pricing
wireless closely to fixed and they’re seeing the same
sort of growth that we experienced. But you really
have to rethink your whole backhaul. You need to
move to an all IP core network, and the point-to-point
E1 leased line structure has to go. It just gets too
expensive because you need so much capacity.
Since we launched, the downlink speeds have
gone up to 7.2 Mbps and the uplink to 2Mbps. E1s
are only Mbps, so it’s an inefficient way of doing
things. You need to move to an all IP network, and
that puts a lot of pressure on the infrastructure
manufacturers, so the Nokias, Ericssons, Huaweis
and ZTEs, have to move. Some of them have
already. There is a lot of change going on.
Mobile Communications International | First for news, best for business
backhaul, but they will care about the experience
they have in comparison to their fixed
internet life and their friends’ and peers’
mobile experiences.
If carriers are sharing facilities for voice,
then why not for backhaul? According to
Ovum’s Lively there is little evidence of that
happening today: “There are plenty of companies
sharing passively, using the same tower,
but that doesn’t address the traffic issue.
Active sharing, so using the same boxes and
transport facilities, is very uncommon today.
People have tried, but no one is doing it.”
Aircom’s Ian Goetz agrees: “As you get to
more ubiquitous coverage, then the network
ceases to be the same differentiator. We’re
seeing companies coming along saying ‘yeah,
we need to optimise our radio networks not
just radio but also the backhaul and also
some of the more esoteric aspects like how
We realised that we couldn’t real-
ly carry on using leased circuits. So
we looked again at what it would
cost to build our own backhaul
and we found that it paid for itself
in two years. So we went out for
tender toward the end of last year
and then awarded the contracts.
About 90 per cent of our links
to our base stations were E1s with
2Mbps links, predominantly either
supplied by the old incumbent
SingTel, although ten per cent were
from StarHub. We would self-provide
occasionally using microwave or
fibre optic core. In those days it was not that much
cheaper to self provide, but then when the data rates
went up, we found that the cost to self provide came
down dramatically, compared to leasing so that’s why
we changed.
We’re linking microwave hubs to base stations,
we still have some leased circuits, but now 90 per
cent are linked by microwave, they go to about 600
hubs around Singapore and those hubs are linked
by fibre optic core. And in Singapore’s case because
it is shaped like a big diamond, we’ve got a figure of
eight in the diamond to give redundancy.
BACKHAUL FEATURE
long is the lease, is the landlord good, is it in
the roof of a hospital?”
However, Steventon-Barnes of Tellabs says
he sees sharing as a trend that could develop:
“A number of our customers include consortia
in different countries which have been set up
as network sharing entities. It’s definitely an
option that some operators are pursuing to
make the economics work.”
Backhaul would appear to be a growing
problem for the industry and unfortunately
there is no magic solution. Celtro’s Gorodeisky
sums up the current situation: “We are all in
a learning curve right now. One complexity is
delivering capacity, the other is transition of
technologies. Maybe the vendors are a little
ahead of the operators. But the vendors are
helping push the operators. Whenever there is
a challenge for the operators, it is good news
for the vendors.” ��
Ericsson provides the microwave, and for the
fibre optics we’re just digging the roads, so we
haven’t actually finished the tender process yet.
The project at the moment is digging the roads
and putting the ducts in. It all takes time because
you need the permissions to dig up the roads. We
think the fibre project will be complete towards
the end of 2009. But in the meantime we can link
our microwave hubs using much higher speed and
cheaper IP connections. We are not going to see a
lot of cost savings in 2008. They’ll start coming in
by 2009 and 2010.”
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