OREANDA-NEWS.  September 09, 2014. NEC Corporation (TSE: NEC 6701) will be outlining the key industry trends driving a massive wave of disruptive innovation in the mobile backhaul industry as we head towards 2020 and beyond in keynote speeches at the Packet Microwave & Mobile Backhaul conference on 22-24 September 2014 in Dusseldorf.

NEC believes that network operators will increasingly share and trade end-to-end network capacity, helping to ensure a competitive, sustainable and innovation-friendly market. We'll also see the advent of connectivity marketplaces, enabling a diversity of service providers without their own network assets to reach customers in a flexible and price-competitive way that accommodates constantly changing demand profiles. Mobile backhaul will increasingly be a key piece of this puzzle as wireless connectivity and mobility grow to support new services other than traditional voice and data.

"Generating decent margins from mobile data will require scale, accelerating the adoption of new business models initially triggered by the rise of Over The Top (OTT) services," said Dejan Bojic, Director of Global Product Strategy at NEC. "This will lead to the creation of new Network-as-a-Service market. Incumbent players will benefit from the cost advantages that sharing commoditised connectivity brings. New entrants will be able to focus on providing differentiated services for highly segmented consumer, enterprise, industrial and government vertical markets using these high quality carrier-grade network assets. New solutions will be required to ensure throughput, availability and latency guarantees of this diversity of users are met."

With these needs in mind, NEC is focusing on three key areas of technology innovation:
Capacity: More capacity will always be needed due to organic traffic growth, new mobile broadcast and M2M services - for example in the automotive industry - but also because the same physical assets will be used by multiple service providers. The network typology will become more diverse with the use of Cloud RAN and fibre backhaul, where available, and a hyper dense small cell layer with a new breed of wireless backhaul solutions.

Service-driven networks: New tools that manage Quality of Service (QoS) in a highly granular and differentiated way will be essential with a large diversity of service providers and applications using the same physical assets. Next generation automated OAM&P (Operations, Administration, Maintenance & Provisioning) solutions will be required to meet the needs of a diversity of services and applications sharing Software Defined Network (SDN) infrastructure as virtual tenants.

Cost: The cost-per-bit of backhaul transport will continue to drop in light of the ability to trade connectivity on an open market with greater price transparency and competition. In addition, new virtualisation and analytics technologies will enable more extensive and agile use of spare capacity in the network, improving the efficiency of existing assets and eliminating costs of unnecessary over-provisioning.

Bojic continued, "We're at the beginning of exciting journey towards quality-of-service-aware path selection across a multi-layered backhaul and radio access network. These technologies will enable operators to dynamically manage their network resources for new services across different market segments. NEC's broad portfolio of future-proofed backhaul solutions meet operators' capacity and coverage needs today while supporting the migration path towards a less vertically integrated and more service provider orientated market."

A webinar is being held to discuss these topics on 10 September at 16hrs or on demand via the Layer 123 website http://www.layer123.com/live. NEC is also inviting operators to a range of presentations, panel debates and workshops at the Packet Microwave & Mobile Backhaul  conference where they'll be able to find out more.