Mobile broadband traffic is growing about 100% year-on-year, and even higher in some cases. Network service providers worldwide are making the transition from TDM to packet-based networks to handle the huge explosion in mobile broadband traffic.
Daniel Tang, CTO of Huawei Network Product Line, comments that historically, many operators have been leasing SDH capacity for backhaul, which proves unsustainable when they move to mobile broadband. In Indonesia, for instance, operators need to pay USD100,000 rental per year for one site if they continue to lease SDH, so they need to shift from ‘releasing capacity’ to ‘buying capacity’. Future-proof and comprehensive IP RAN provides an optimal solution to build their new backhaul infrastructure for 3G and LTE services.
The major challenge for operators moving from TDM-based to IP-based backhaul is the learning curve of field engineers who typically have TDM background. The TDM network is like a baby that requires a lot of provisioning work, but it is predictable; IP is more like a teenager who may run into trouble from time to time. What Huawei does is to retain the self-governing nature of the IP backhaul, while visualizing its behaviors. Huawei has already released its MPLS-based and MPLS-TP-based O&M solutions, with which operators can do a hybrid O&M solution (MPLS O&M at the aggregation section, MPLS-TP O&M at the access).
Laurent Durand, E2E IP Architect, Mobistar, says that Mobistar is replacing its legacy infrastructure (which is mostly SDH) with a new convergent network, while still using legacy mechanisms for synchronization as they need to ensure that equipment from different vendors can support the protocol, no easy task. In the future, Mobistar will upgrade the synchronization mechanisms.
