CTIA and the “W’s” of Network Planning
Last week at CTIA, there was a lot of talk about wireless backhaul and the technology 
needed to address bottlenecks that high-bandwidth mobile services create, as described in a recent Telephony article. In this story, the head of Juniper Networks’ mobile and FMC segment calls backhaul one of the weakest links in today’s wireless networks, and reps from Ericsson and Ceragon Networks both say the move to Ethernet is inevitable, but that not every company is ready to make the leap. The article also points out that wireless operators are faced with the dilemma of having data services that are eating up all their backhaul bandwidth but not making significant revenue.
What I find most interesting is that the story features a number of solutions that can help carriers address the need to cost-effectively increase backhaul and deploy newer faster networks, but doesn’t provide guidance on how they can determine which one is a right fit. All the proposed solutions help carriers to determine what is necessary to support high-bandwidth services (the why), but leave them to figure out the remaning “W’s” - when, where and how - on their own.
