A new report from Juniper Research says mobile network operators urgently need to spend billions of dollars increasing capacity and optimising their backhaul networks to meet the demands of mobile broadband users. The report calculates that operators need to spend almost $840 billion (£530 billion) globally over the next five years.
The Mobile Network Backhaul report found that existing backhaul networks weren’t capable of supporting the increase in data users and data traffic that’s been forecast.
Nitin Bhas, who wrote the report, said “As many operators are either deploying 3G or augmenting/upgrading their network to 4G, they need to simultaneously manage the upgrade of their backhaul networks with the upgrade of their radio networks.”
Microwave and fibre are expected to dominate the backhaul market, with microwave connections accounting for over 60% of global mobile backhaul capacity by 2016.