Ethernet a must for mobile backhaul

NetEvents 2009

Mobile network providers have to move to Ethernet to cope with the growing demand for high bandwidth mobile services, according to the Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF).

The global industry alliance of organisations from all sectors of the telecoms industry has unveiled its Carrier Ethernet for Mobile Backhaul Implementation Agreement (MBIA), which lays out how to apply existing MEF specifications and industry standards to meet the increasing demands for mobile data and other high bandwidth applications.

The growing adoption of 3G services, and the wide scale rollout of new 4G technologies, means that the need for significant amounts of network capacity at the back end is only going to accelerate.

Phil Tilley, vice president of marketing for the IP division at Alcatel-Lucent, a member of the MEF, explained that there have been fears about moving to Carrier Ethernet for mobile backhaul.

These have primarily been around technical concerns such as availability, management, synchronisation and scalability, but Tilley believes that these have all been addressed, paving the way for wide-scale rollout of the technology. " The questions about the use and implementation of Carrier Ethernet are no longer questions," he said.

Michael Howard, an industry analyst at Infonetics Research, maintains that Ethernet is the only viable and cost-effective option for next-generation mobile backhaul networks.

"When you take into account the popularity of the iPhone and its clones, plus a new wave of mobile devices including computer dongles, it is not difficult to see why the operators are under pressure to deliver a lot more bandwidth in highly competitive markets," he said.

"Legacy Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) and Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) backhaul transport services cannot match the scalability, much lower cost-per-bit, and other packet advantages of Carrier Ethernet."

Recent research from Infonetics predicts that Ethernet backhaul, be it over copper, fibre or microwave, will add over a million new or converted connections between 2009 and 2011 worldwide.

Operators usually turn to E1 or T1 lines for their mobile backhaul networks, relying on TDM and ATM technologies to deliver mobile voice, data and video broadband applications.