Ongoing investment in RAN capacity is ultimately required if operators are to meet growing traffic demands. "Operators can try to deflect continued base station investment, but investing in additional capacity will have to eventually catch up with some operators, especially if they want to remain competitive," McCormick said.
WLAN/Wimax offloading is still thought to be the most effective means to handle increased data traffic, apart from adding extra sites. To keep up with traffic growth, 45% say Wi-Fi/Wimax offloading of the macro-network would be the most effective option while 14% point to femtocells (see chart 5).
Other traffic management techniques receiving significant support were new pricing schemes (18%) and policy control and throttling (16%).
The adoption of femtocells has also increased marginally in this regard, but she said femtocells seem unlikely to be more than a niche solution for offloading traffic from the network. "Ovum continues to believe there is no one silver bullet to deal with traffic growth."
Respondent profile
The Telecom Asia-Ovum online survey was conducted in December and January and had responses from 276 telecom executives in more than 20 countries across Asia Pacific. A quarter were mobile operators while another 25% were integrated players. Management accounted for 26% of respondents, engineering/operations 25% and sales/marketing 30%. This is the third year the survey was conducted with support from Ovum.