The move towards shared Infrastructure as a Service models in mobile network provision - is there a sustainability silver lining?
Flat revenues for mobile service providers in developed nations continue to put pressure on infrastructure costs. Mobile service providers are faced with the challenge of ever-growing expectations from subscribers that require costly network upgrades without the pay back of higher ARPUs. In response we have seen two trends in the industry regarding network rollout and ownership:
- The rise of tower providers, who have been increasingly acquiring sites and structures from MNOs and broadcasters.
- Virtualisation and cloudification of the mobile network so that network functions are no longer performed on dedicated hardware in MNO owned base stations but can be run in third party data centres.
Both of the above trends mean that the industry is moving towards acquiring access to network infrastructure and assets ‘on demand’. In this session we will explore this transition towards ‘on demand’ shared mobile infrastructure and whether this could have the sustainability silver lining of reducing overprovisioning of equipment and clutter on our streetscapes.
