By Juan Prieto, Product Marketing Manager, Infovista
Infovista and Billing & OSS World teamed up on a survey examining the telecom industry's state and perception of IP/Ethernet mobile backhaul performance. The results found that although Carrier Ethernet is very likely to become the most popular choice for next-generation backhaul architectures it hasn't been completely adopted by the industry yet.
Although IP/Ethernet backhaul is frequently implemented to minimize the costly effects of rapid mobile data traffic growth, not all mobile network operators (MNOs) rely on this technology for their next-generation core and metro networks. In fact, 97 percent of MNOs responded that they have not completed an implementation of – and are not benefitting from – IP/Ethernet backhaul. Thirty three percent of respondents said that they are only at the early planning stages, while 15 percent are still conducting vendor relations, 28 percent have just begun deployment, and 24 percent are close to completion.
While MNOs are planning to leverage Carrier Ethernet for next-generation backhaul, the main drivers for transforming backhaul infrastructure were spread across numerous factors: cost efficiencies versus time division multiplexing (TDM)/asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) connectivity (18 percent), architectural requirement of LTE (33 percent) and demand for increasing backhaul capacity (49 percent).
A number of the findings from this survey were also quite surprising, including the correlation between IP/Ethernet backhaul implementation and MNOs' confidence in the future performance of their backhaul network. For example, when it came to next-generation backhaul, 66 percent were not confident in establishing proper visibility into third-party / leased backhaul performance.
These survey results give some interesting insight into how MNOs perceive backhaul and their implementation of Carrier Ethernet over the next few years. Our hope is that these findings will help MNOs be better prepared to plan, deploy and assure the performance of this future transport architecture.
