The Wireless Industry’s Dirty Little Secret

Last week’s daylong outage of phone, Internet, and cellular service in coastal California highlighted an uncomfortable fact about today’s sophisticated fiber optics-based telecommunications: They are highly vulnerable to physical sabotage.

Can't get there from here.

What most observers missed, though, is the wireless carriers’ dirty little secret: Mobile and wireless networks are increasingly vulnerable not just to evildoers but to simple overloads. Something like 80 percent of cell towers connect to the larger network via wireline backhaul networks. Those backhaul networks, usually comprising your basic T1 lines, are getting swamped, largely as a result of new devices (i.e., the iPhone) that run video streams and other highly data-intensive applications. One study has shown that users of T-Mobile’s G1 phone, based on the Android operating system from Google Inc. (GOOG), consume 50 times more data than they did on their previous devices.

“The backhaul network is being overwhelmed by the rapid increase in bandwidth demand resulting from the introduction of newer 3G (HSDPA+) and 4G (LTE and WiMax) technologies,” said a recent report called “Wireless Backhaul Network Solutions” from Ciena. What’s more, “the operational costs associated with traditional backhaul methods are rising faster than the revenue generated by the new data services.”

That’s a heavy-duty crunch looming. Lee Doyle, group VP and general manager of network infrastructure and security products and services at IDC, echoed those concerns: “Unless there is sufficient investment into new infrastructure, the increased bandwidth demands of new advanced services could well outstrip capacity."

Big wireless carriers have been aware of this backhaul backlog for some time, but until recently they haven’t done a whole lot about it. Backhaul was the subject of some serious teeth-gnashing at the big CTIA Wireless show earlier this month in Las Vegas. Verizon Wireless (VZ) said it would make a major upgrade to its backhaul network, pushing fiber to thousands of new cell sites and replacing legacy, T1 lines with carrier-grade Ethernet links. Verizon Partner Solutions, the wholesale division of Verizon, will lay fiber to about 90 percent of the cell towers in the carrier’s territory in the next five years.