The mobile data surge, together with the LTE and LTE-Advance standards, represent many changes both in technology and in the business models and opportunities for operators and providers in this domain.
The need for higher bandwidth is driving mobile providers to look for solution that will allow them to support it. Femto and pico cells are smaller base stations that have been designed to support smaller areas. They allow the mobile operator to offload the larger cell traffic and offer higher bandwidth in small location typically with higher population density.
As the price of femto and pico cells drops, mobile operators will deploy increasingly more of these smaller base stations to accommodate high density user areas such as shopping malls, convention centers and transportation centers. This means that the cost center of the mobile operator network will shift to mobile backhaul. This will require that the mobile operator lease more and more services from the wholesale providers who already have a footprint in the service area, clearly creating a huge opportunity for utilities, wholesale providers and even the incumbent fixed broadband operators to provide the infrastructure that mobile operators will require for mobile backhaul.
But these opportunities come with additional requirements like time synchronization , CES, OAM, and tight QoS support. We have seen that 1588v2 is gaining momentum, yet SyncE is becoming more common, thus confirming our belief that the mobile backhaul network will be a hybrid time synchronization technology network.
The increasing demand for bandwidth combined with new mobile equipment like smartphone, tablets, laptops etc. is creating new challenges for mobile operators. That’s why we are targeting our solutions to address not only the bandwidth and synchronization demands but also provide the ability for operators to optimize their existing infrastructure in order to minimize both CAPEX and OPEX.
