February 8th, 2012, Los Angeles: This year’s first MEF Quarterly Meeting brings very welcome news to mobile operators and their access providers with the launch of the MEF’s Mobile Backhaul Initiative for 4G/LTE. It brings a technical solution to the challenged backhaul, resulting in potential 25% backhaul savings for mobile operators, up to 3x revenue growth for access providers over existing network infrastructure, while delivering equal or better end user experience. Given mind-bending predictions on mobile backhaul build-out costs, the scale of the savings could amount to the hundreds of millions of dollars! These significant benefits are powered by Carrier Ethernet’s innate ability to support Multiple Classes of Services (Multi-CoS), which is newly standardized as MEF 23.1 Multi-CoS Implementation Agreement. View MEF Mobile Backhaul Initiative video.

  “Mobile Operators all agree that the industry’s single biggest challenge and operating cost is in delivering the bandwidth needed for 4G/LTE backhaul” says MEF President, Nan Chen. “It’s important to take a holistic approach, so for the first time, the MEF introduces its Mobile Backhaul Initiative with an integrated suite consisting of the MEF 22.1 Mobile Backhaul implementation agreement, MEF 23.1 Multi-CoS implementation agreement, and a technical business paper clarifying the urgency and justification of migrating to Multi-CoS if cost-effective expansion and efficient deployment of 4G/LTE are to be achieved. It also includes other technical guidance on best practices and a new paper on packet-based frequency synchronization.”

“Multi-CoS is a breakthrough in delivering sustainable quality and profitable deployment of mobile services, because it allows highly efficient bandwidth usage – with less dependency on over-provisioning, combined with more responsive QoS delivered to more users.” Said Nav Chander, Sr. Analyst at IDC, “it delivers significant benefits to both mobile operators and Ethernet access provider partners; and MEF is at the forefront of enabling the onset of a whole new class of mobile value-added services.”