Cambridge Broadband Networks launches ‘Backhaul Blog’

Cambridge Broadband Networks launches ‘Backhaul Blog’ to spur debate across telecoms industry. Creates forum to discuss issues and opportunities around all forms of backhaul. Cambridge UK, 2 July 2008: Backhaul is one of the biggest issues facing mobile operators today and according to ABI Research already accounts for 30 percent of their operating expenditure with an annual cost of $20 billion. In response, Cambridge Broadband Networks, the developer of carrier-class transmission equipment for cellular backhaul, has today launched a blog to foster discussion around the issues.

Known as ‘the backhaul blog’, the forum is aimed at a wide cross-section of industry professionals, including mobile operators, analysts and journalists, and will carry thought-provoking comment from a variety of contributors. The launch comes at a time when traditional fixed line and microwave backhaul solutions are fast becoming an area of contention for operators with the introduction of high bandwidth, data-oriented services, ‘all you can eat’ price plans and mobile broadband ‘dongles’, all of which dramatically increase the network capacity requirements.

This growth in mobile data represents a major challenge for cellular operators according to Lance Hiley, VP Market Strategy at Cambridge Broadband Networks: “Backhauling data is currently too expensive for operators and is eroding their profit margins. Arguably most also currently lack the capacity to cope with exponential data growth and there is concern that should devices such as HSPA dongles become too widely used before backhaul capacity is upgraded, the overall experience for their customers will decline as cell sites get overloaded with data requests. As such operators around the world will have to think carefully about how they upgrade their backhaul infrastructure. This blog has been setup as an open forum for the industry to discuss these challenges and how we as a community of stakeholders can help solve them.”