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International Agents
And the foundation for this swell of op-
portunity lies in ongoing global invest-
ment in broadband technologies.
According to research firm Budde-
Comm, high-speed broadband must
evolve to meet the needs, both eco-
nomic and societal, of developed mar-
kets. In fact, in many of these markets,
wireless broadband and fiber to the
premises (FTTP) are developing in a
complementary and harmonious way
because of end-user demand.
“Current 4G networks offer excellent
broadband services and, as long as the
usage is limited, the prices are competi-
tive,” the firm said. “However, as soon
as the mobile networks become used for
[video], the affordability drops significant-
ly. At the same time, the quality is moving
from HDTV to 4K, and it remains unlikely
that these services can be supported by
wireless networks at affordable prices.”
The latest Cisco Visual Networking In-
dex Global IP Traffic Forecast predicts that
Internet traffic will have a compound annual
growth rate of 29 percent during the next
decade, growing tenfold. Out of that, video
will represent more than 82 percent of all
traffic by 2020; and most of that will be
carried on wireless networks.
At the same time, billions more IoT
devices are poised to come onto the net-
work, with varying levels of ARPU – some
delivering single-digit monthly revenue.
In 2016, the market share of fiber
infrastructure lines finally overtook DSL
technologies as the largest on a global
level, Budde-Comm noted. FTTx held
only a 22 percent market share of global
broadband access technologies in 2013,
but by 2016 this had increased to around
47 percent.
But absent ubiquitous fiber infrastruc-
ture, the wireless industry will look for new
opportunities and will push the boundaries
further and further.
And indeed, the next iteration of LTE
(and, eventually, 5G) is first and fore-
most looking to solve a top wireless
industry dilemma: it’s expected that net-
works by 2020 will need to support an
almost 1,000-fold increase in capacity
demand, according to Nokia and most
other industry players.
Fortunately, technologies are on the
horizon that promise the more efficient
use of wireless spectrum. This includes
using small cells, millimeter wave bands
with massive MIMO and beamforming, and
dynamic shared spectrum approaches.
LTE Broadcast, or LTE-B, also known
as multimedia broadcast multicast
service (eMBMS) took a step further in
late April 2016 with the announcement
that Verizon, Telstra, KT (South Korea)
and EE (United Kingdom) had formed the
LTE-B Alliance. The alliance hopes to en-
courage further operators to join the push
for LTE-B, and in particular to encourage
device manufacturers to begin making
devices LTE-B compatible in 2017.
5G technology is also now well and
truly under development. While there are
no firm standards in place, the industry
is working hard at making that happen.
The use of millimeter wave spectrum
for 5G took a significant step forward in
mid-July with the U.S. becoming the first
Broadband Pushes Global
Channel Opportunities
C
hannel partners worldwide are testing the waters
on new business services such as Voice over LTE
(VoLTE), video conferencing, video-enabled smart city
offerings, cloud applications, the Internet of Things (IoT), soft-
ware-defined networking, native rich media and more, open-
ing up brand-new revenue-generating opportunities in 2017
in the international market.
By
Tara
Seals
48
Channel
Vision
|
January - February, 2017