A 4G base station can’t be any faster than its backhaul. An article in the February 2010 issue of AGL magazine, written by analysts at Visant Strategies, looks at how backhauls improving in speed to match new air interfaces. Over the next five years, they see the number of base stations having more than 24 Mbps of backhaul capacity increasing more than 20-times.
Today most backhaul links are wireline; through 2015, the percentage of wireless versus wireline backhaul links is predicted to increase, with percentages about even by 2016. The number of backhaul links in wireless networks is predicted to increase from 300,000 in 2008 to 500,000 in 2015.
