Results of the report were released today and follow a similar report last year, which revealed potential capital expenditure (Capex) savings of $4 billion for operators using SDN.
“Earlier, we highlighted the key role of SDN in closing the mobile backhaul gap,” said Stu Benington, director of technology and strategy at Tellabs. “Now we can show that on top of the Capex savings, SDN can cut Opex dramatically and preserve operator margins in backhaul networks.”
SDN is designed to manage traffic and backhaul bandwidth, and Tellabs reveals that Opex savings using SDN are more than twice as much as the previously identified Capex savings.
The study revealed that SDN could save 25%-75% of Opex across five verticals: Wifi, Cloud RAN, internet IXP, metro aggregation and small cells.
Tellabs highlighted Wifi as having the highest potential saving of $3,144 million by 2017, followed by Cloud RAN with $2,173 million.
The report also looked at the potential Opex savings per region by 2017. Asia-Pacific is estimated to save the most, at $5,619 million – more than quadruple that of the second-highest saver, North America at $1,263 million.
