15th April - UK incumbent BT looks set to clean up as the much talked about increase in mobile data traffic switches the pressure up on backhaul networks.

Last week, Vodafone UK announced a five year mobile backhaul contract with BT Wholesale. Under the agreement, BT will provide backhaul speeds of up to 60Mbps through its 21st Century Network (21CN), connecting Vodafone's base stations and its core national network with a combination of leased lines and Ethernet.

The deal is similar in structure to the landmark agreement T-Mobile UK struck with BT last summer, and analysts believe is indicative of a trend.

With voice revenues on the slide, data services have long been viewed as the operators' ARPU saviour. Last year finally saw data overtake voice in terms of network load and with many operators now touting the benefits of affordable mobile broadband there is every chance that data volumes will soon dwarf traffic generated by voice.

In 2007, industry analyst Ovum estimated that 90 per cent of this backhaul traffic was carried by the mobile operators themselves or by a business related to their parent company. But the researcher expects this figure to change as it will become very expensive for mobile operators that do not have a fixed incumbent as a parent to invest in new technologies that can cope with the new requirements for mobile backhaul services.

Fernanda Mello Veiga, senior analyst at Ovum, said: "We believe that most other mobile operators will follow Vodafone and T-Mobile's example and partner mobile backhaul service providers that can offer flexible and scalable bandwidth to meet increased data application demand. This is a good market opportunity for BT that has made a considerable investment in its 21CN to generate just such new revenue streams."

Mello Veiga notes that there is also a possibility of using a hybrid infrastructure of T1/EI leased lines for voice and Ethernet based solutions for data, saying that there, "are a lot of technical concerns now about the reliability of T1/E1 leased line use for mobile backhaul as mobile data traffic increases, especially in peak times, through the growth in usage of high-bandwidth mobile applications."