In their latest Q&A, iDirect spoke to Speedcast’s Director of Business & Product Development, David Bunting, about the opportunities and challenges for satellite service providers to grow their businesses in the cellular backhaul space.
The remote customer profile is changing. Those that are not yet connected will be coming online and demanding data beyond voice services. In fact, NSR finds that bandwidth requirements are growing at 31.2% CAGR and likely to surpass 4 Tbps by 2028. Satellite service providers can help mobile operators handle this growing demand by expanding their cellular backhaul offerings.
Several technological developments and trends are driving cellular backhaul’s expanded scope, such as high throughput satellites (HTS), the sinking cost of satellite capacity, LEO satellites, and the advancement of network optimization and virtualization technologies. However, mobile operators will have to develop financially viable solutions and satellite providers will need major capex and opex investments to make this future a reality.
In order to provide mobile operators with an affordable and easy-to-manage cellular backhaul solution over satellites, Speedcast is a proponent of cellular backhaul as an end-to-end managed service, wherein a specialized solutions provider takes care of everything including designing, purchasing, installing, configuring, managing, monitoring, analyzing and optimizing all the necessary parts of the solution.
Read more on cellular backhaul as a service here: https://www.speedcast.com/innovation/cellular-backhaul-as-a-service/