As noted earlier, wireless industry experts believe that mobile backhaul networks represent a big opportunity, mostly because the proliferation of 3G and 4G networks and easy availablity of iPhone type devices is going to boost mobile data and video use.

Infonetics Research has issued a report which forecasts 4.4 billion mobile subscribers worldwide by 2011, and their needs will push the demand for wireless backhaul equipment to over $10 billion by that year. Infonetics predicts that the big spending is going to happen on IP/Ethernet portion of worldwide mobile backhaul equipment with triple digit growth rates predicted from 2007 to 2011. No surprise: T-Mobile, Swisscom Mobile, and Telecom Italia are all building IP/Ethernet based backhaul networks. Ironically, given the amount of money being spent on this sector there isn’t much start-up activity in this space.