During the last few weeks I have spent a lot of time talking to and visiting with people involved with the Mobile industry in Europe, where a shift to flat rate data plans has stimulated a very fast adoption of mobile data by far more users. One person that I was talking to said that mobile data usage at one of the UK Operators had grown eight fold since Christmas – Similar growth is happening in the US, while demand in many of the Asian markets is already a long way ahead of both.

The challenge for Mobile Operators with all of this data growth is to make sure that network capacity keeps pace with ‘hockey stick’ bandwidth demand, while managing costs that can very easily skyrocket – Nowhere is this more important than in mobile network access / backhaul planning, where Operators must move quickly to deploy innovative access solutions that balance low cost, with easily scalable bandwidth to the base station.

To realize the best possible solution to this problem, Operators need to characterize the emerging demand for data from a mobility perspective – Because different mobile customers use different data applications at different times in different places.  These dynamics result in variable demand for bandwidth not only at the base station and for back haul but also at each layer of the network between the base station and application server(s) that provide the service(s) – When planning for optimal end-to-end bandwidth and quality of service, there are many engineering dependencies between each layer of the network that if not addressed properly can result in capacity bottlenecks that result in poor service performance.

For this reason it is vitally important that Mobile Operators plan bandwidth requirements holistically across their networks, leveraging real world demand information. To ensure that backhaul bandwidth meets emerging ‘hockey stick’ demand it’s easy to see that Operators need to deploy fiber to the base stations sooner rather than later – And in the interests of reducing costs, give serious consideration to the business case for RAN sharing – Including backhaul infrastructure sharing that may well drive a decision to share more base station sites and ultimately perhaps the entire network.