By Telecom
Lead Team: AT&T is planning to invest about $20 billion in 2012 with a
focus on wireless, 4G LTE deployment, distributed antenna systems, Wi-Fi Hot
Spots and others. This will be a big boost for telecom equipment makers such as
Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, ZTE, etc.
The news is
significant for several stakeholders as the telecom industry is going through a
tough phase due to industry slowdown.
AT&T has
invested more than $95 billion in its wireless and wireline networks over the
past five years. In 2011, we invested $20 billion in our networks, and
completed more than 150,000 wireless network improvements. We will be investing
around $20 billion in 2012,” said John Donovan, senior executive vice
president, AT&T Technology and Network Operations, AT&T, in his blog.
Over the
past five years, AT&T’s wireless data traffic has grown 20,000 percent.
But when
the year-end numbers show a doubling of wireless data traffic from 2010 to 2011
– and you’ve seen at least a doubling every year since 2007 – the implications
are profound,” Donovan added.
The growth
is now driven primarily by smartphones. Add to that new customer
additions and the continuing trend of upgrades from feature phones to
smartphones, and you have a wireless data tsunami. AT&T is addressing the
challenge by investing to drive service improvements.
In fact,
AT&T is gearing up to meet challenges mentioned in the Cisco Visual
Networking Index (VNI) Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast for 2011 to 2016.
Mobile data traffic to increase 18-fold over the next five
years: Cisco
Cisco said global mobile data traffic will increase
18-fold over the next five years, reaching 10.8 exabytes per month — or an
annual run rate of 130 exabytes — by 2016.
The increase in mobile traffic is due to a surge in the
number of mobile Internet-connected devices, which will exceed the number of
people on earth.
During 2011-2016, global mobile data traffic will outgrow
global fixed data traffic by three times. This mobile data traffic increase
represents a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 78 percent spanning the
forecast period. The incremental amount of traffic being added to the mobile
Internet between 2015 and 2016 alone is approximately three times the estimated
size of the entire mobile Internet in 2012.
