Bates, who spoke on this issue at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on 15 February, says that most operators have indicated that they intend to expand their capacity by moving from circuit-based to packet-based backhaul. At the same time, there are increasing commercial and regulatory pressures on operators to share sites.

"We believe that this combination of factors creates a unique opportunity for incumbent fixed-line operators and their altnet competitors to offer shared, packet-based backhaul services", explains Bates.

He adds, "Backhaul-on-demand, as we call it, can be a win-win situation for both the buyer and the seller. Mobile operators eliminate the risk of over or under-dimensioning their backhaul networks as a result of errors in forecasting future levels of data traffic, avoid the capital expenditure associated with a move to packet-based backhaul, and safeguard their quality of service at shared sites by means of a service-level agreement with the backhaul provider.

Meanwhile, backhaul providers secure large, long-term revenue opportunities and can mitigate the traffic forecasting risk to some extent through their ability to aggregate the traffic from multiple operators at low incremental cost."