BUSINESS ANALYSIS FOR TELECOMS PROFESSIONALS JULY/AUGUST 2010 LEADER SPENDING TIME
Commitment to spending on new network technologies, while maintaining healthy balance sheets, is a challenge for operators
Ian Kemp Editor
ian.kemp@
totaltele.com
sions on capex commitments for some big infrastructure projects. In this issue we look at two of the key technologies in which carriers are investing: LTE and fibre networks. Many operators are carrying out
O
trials of LTE, but most are choosing the circumspect path of moving to HSPA upgrades before fully committing to deployment. The GSM Association says there were 296commercialHSPAnetworksand 40 HSPA+networksworldwide by June. It cites figures from Deutsche Bank that operatorswill invest up to US$72 billion globally in non-LTE
‘Global carrier capex will decline again this year’
mobile broadband technologies over the next 12 months. However,there aresomeearly
LTE movers with clear rollout time- tables, and analysts are forecasting accelerated spend to 2015 (see p.6). Nevertheless, the cost of deploying LTE is high, not least in terms of spectrum and backhaul costs. One way operators could reduce some of the burden is to share LTE infra- structure: one analyst company in our article calculates that could lead to capex savings of up to 30%.
ver the next 18 months fixed and mobile operators will be taking crucial deci-
Infonetics Research in a recent
report says telcos reduced capex by 5.9% worldwide in 2009 (see chart p.3). It forecasts global carrier capex will decline again in 2010, followed by a new investment cycle starting in 2011 driven by a wave of mobile upgrades, including LTE rollouts, and fibre broadband networks. Governments and operators are
still grappling with the business models for those fibre networks and how to avoid new NGN service divides. On p.10 we outline some of the latest plans and figures for fibre deployments globally. But while subscriber growth in
mobileand broadbandcontinues apace, revenues remain flat at best. Telegeography says service provid- ersadded 161millionwireless and14 million broadband subscribers in the first quarter, but revenue for the top 30 service providers ($300 billion) was down 2.1% on Q4 2009. Growth is largely coming from developing countries where ARPUs are low. In Europe
some carriers retain subscribers
turningtoquadruple-play strate- gies in order to raise ARPUs, as well as
provisioning all these new services will be an added burden for opera- tors, which are holding out for the holy grailofagile opticalnetworks (p.16). I hope you enjoy this issue, and in the next Total Telecom Plus (September)wewillcontinueto bring you analysis on telco business models and technologies.
CONTENTS NEWS IN BRIEF 4 Timeline
A roundup of some of the major stories reported in our daily news service,
www.totaltele.com
NETWORK STRATEGIES
6 LTE network sharing
High capex costs to deploy LTE networks could lead more telcos to consider sharing the build and operating burden.
BUSINESS AND FINANCE 10 Fibre funding
How governments and telcos are working out the dynamics of funding new fibre networks. Plus stats on current FTTx rollouts.
TECNOLOGY TRENDS
14 Agile optical networks
The holy grail of dynamic optical networks that can reconfigure themselves to provision capacity and restore faults.
CONTENT STRATEGIES are (p.14). Yet
16 Quadruple-play bundling models
Mobile is proving a tricky sell for operators turning to quad-play to improve ARPU and keep end users.
STATISTICS 20 Prime Numbers
Striking statistics from key telecoms reports, including the latest global mobile, IPTV and mobile TV subscriber numbers.
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