SINGAPORE -- CommunicAsia 2011 -- Mobile operators could find themselves sidelined in the cloud services market if they don't concentrate on and invest in their backhaul networks, warned a BT Global Services executive here today.

Sean Bergin, head of global telecom markets for Southeast Asia at BT Global Services told delegates at the CommunicAsia conference that the "quality of experience is not there yet" for mobile operator cloud services and that's mainly down to backhaul constraints.

Bergin noted that across Asia/Pacific mobile operator networks teams are struggling to keep up with the backhaul and IP transit capacity required to service the growing number of smartphone users on their networks, while the marketing divisions of those operators continue to offer increasingly more attractive smartphone-based service package offerings that only exacerbate the stress on the carriers' infrastructure and operations.

"We spend most of our time selling consultancy services around mobile backhaul," noted Bergin, who believes that the biggest hurdle to the development of cloud services in the region will be the ability (or inability) of mobile operators to offer acceptable service level agreements (SLAs), an issue directly related to backhaul capacity constraints.

The operators need to be able to guarantee the delivery of the cloud services and applications they want to offer and so should think about their backhaul investments, and how they can host content and applications as close to the edge of the network as possible, if they're to deliver on any promises.

— Ray Le Maistre, International Managing Editor, Light Reading