SINGAPORE: Based on IDC's continuous research of the Asia/Pacific (including Japan) carrier network equipment market, IDC predicts that there will be over 3 million basestations and over 1.8 million cell sites in by 2012, representing a growth of 24.3 percet and 10.7 percent respectively from 2008.

Approximately half of these sites will be connected to fiber through carrier Ethernet. Urban 3G/High-Speed Packet Access (HSPA) basestations will be linked to fiber by 2011 in most markets in the region. IDC also expects that almost all urban WiMAX and Long Term Evolution (LTE) basestations will be connected to fiber by 2012. Non-line-of-sight (NLOS) microwave and fixed WiMAX will be used to provide up to 300 mbps backhaul in areas where fiber is not available.

Bill Rojas, research director, Telecommunications Research, IDC Asia/Pacific, said: "A number of leading mobile carriers in Asia/Pacific, in countries such as Australia, Hong Kong, India, Japan, Korea, Japan, Philippines, and Singapore, are already starting to connect parts of their metropolitan 3G/HSPA backhauls with Carrier Ethernet over fiber. The main driver of this transformation is the need for mobile operators to provide scalable, high-bandwidth, web 2.0 video and audio content, and internet access services for both mobile and fixed users in incremental CAPEX outlays.”

Mobile operators in the region are faced with five key challenges that are driving the need for more bandwidth to the end-user devices (downlink and uplink):

Enhancing coverage spanning dense urban, suburban, and rural areas.
In markets where pre-paid services is dominant, value added data services need to be geared to lower-speed bandwidth while post-paid centric markets must typically target premium value added services.
Potentially exponential increases in data traffic once higher speeds are enabled will not necessarily translate into higher data average revenue per user (ARPU).
Declining voice ARPU means that data ARPU must be increased in the long-term.
Network opex will need to be carefully contained so that it does not grow disproportionately with traffic demand growth.

The combination of the third and fourth challenges means that operators need to offer scalable bandwidth but at tariff schedules that resemble a combination of flat-rate plateaus with specific usage caps. Without the scalable bandwidth in the backhaul, operators will not be able to balance opex and capex, and could find themselves in the noncompetitive situation of not being able to offer new multimedia-rich wireless services because of incremental bandwidth constraints.