The Nook will likely launch a kind of e-reader/tablet price war that inevitably spills over into the broader Android tablet space. Sony also announced its own pair of tablets, one roughly iPad sized and the other a five-by-five inch fold-screen model, which shows that more and more device players are jumping in and jumping on Android.

The result of all this is likely to mirror smartphone trends. Android has already taken the lead and isn’t likely to lose it. That would be bad for Apple because it confronts it with the same problem it had in PCs – a choice to sustain margins and control ARPU by creating a more closed ecosystem costs you market share forever. That makes you a second-tier player in a market you created.

The other dimension of the tablet market that’s critical is the impact of the tablet on 3G/4G planning, policy and deployment. Nobody believes that we’re moving to unlimited-use broadband wireless even now; it’s clear that everyone will do a combination of usage-based pricing and a usage tier that imposes rate-limiting to constrain video at a certain point. Even with those accommodations, wireless capacity needs will be much higher as tablets deploy.

That means more backhaul and metro, less wireline access and core. Most financial analysts are matching our December forecast that wireless will be where growth is and that operators will constrain wireline spending. Wireless impacts metro, and primarily Ethernet, as well as (obviously) the radio network. This could have a very favorable impact on vendors with strong RAN capability matched by support for Ethernet transport/backhaul and mobile/LTE voice elements.

One impact this has had is increased interest among providers in using packet-mode infrastructure to backhaul circuit-switched connections. Running a single fast feed to a 4G tower is bad enough, but doubling it up with TDM backhaul for circuit-mode voice is truly bad news. Extreme Networks did a mobile backhaul announcement that focused on synchronous backhaul and integration of packet-sync traffic with TDM, and now Juniper has snapped up the IP of a startup with synchronous packet backhaul capability.

Another issue created by pushing 4G into the fast lane is the change in the dynamics of the metro network created by all the mobile backhaul paths. A typical metro area (LATA) in the U.S. today would have an average of about 200 central offices. There would likely be 10 to 20 times that many mobile cells (in addition to femtocells and WiFi sites). How will all of these new locations impact the metro mission? And given that 4G will almost certainly drive packet-mode voice over LTE (VoLTE) , could there be pressure to migrate wireline users to VoIP? Operations clearly has to contend with this.

The publicity on this particular issue has ranged from treating it as a face-off between the Internet Engineering Task Force and the International Telecommunication Union to debating the propriety of “reconsidering” T-MPLS based on activity on the last day of a standards meeting after many delegates had gone.

What we think is really going on here is a fight over the role of IP in the metro network. Video content has already convincingly shifted carrier investment to the metro, where it focuses on connecting broadband users (for money) and supporting content delivery network services (for money). Now we’re adding mobile backhaul (more money) to the mix. In the “core,” the low revenue per bit on Internet peering virtually assures minimal growth, so IP has to gain a lot of traction in the metro to continue to grow. But metro is where Carrier Ethernet has been strong, so there’s a battle to make IP capable of supporting the kind of aggregation-to-a-service-point model that Ethernet supports.

T-MPLS was a step to create a transport vision of MPLS to counter what was called PBT (properly PBB-TE) from the Ethernet world. Its OAM standards are Ethernet-like based on the presumption that it was competing with Ethernet, that Ethernet OAM was further advanced at the time and that interacting with metro Ethernet was a likely requirement. MPLS-TP is more “IP-like” — its OAM practices are consistent with those of MPLS and IP pseudowires overall.

It seems to us that the current debate is flawed in that both sides are dodging the technical questions in the name of standards-body politics. What OAM practices would be applied in a metro area? Will Ethernet continue to be deployed on a large scale for backhaul? Are there benefits, particularly in the evolution of mobile backhaul and content delivery to mobile devices, to support true IP connectivity even within a metro network? With what would an MPLS-TP trunk likely connect? We’d like to see a more organized discussion on the real issues here. At the core, we’re afraid it’s just Ethernet versus IP and the old PBT wars all over again.

More significantly, in our view, the talk included comments that operations complexity for metro Ethernet would have to be reduced and that the QoS mechanisms of the 3GPP were too complex and expensive to be feasible. We’ve been hearing for some time that operators believed that the ROI on mobile broadband would never reach levels that could justify some of the evolution visions of the 3GPP.

The issues are bigger than standards or IMS success. It’s a broader question of whether to scrap operations in a traditional way, given the best-effort nature of the Internet traffic that makes up most mobile broadband activity, or to streamline 3GPP processes. The operators we’ve talked to favor something more along the lines of streamlining, but they concede that it may simply take too long.

The pressure on capacity is almost totally due to smartphone deployment, and with netbooks and tablets coming along to further tax capacity, it’s not surprising that 2010 capex is shifting to mobile. In fact, 14 of the 44 operators we survey told us they were planning more mobile capacity in 2010 than they’d figured on as recently as their fall 2009 cycles.

The increased investment, for a time, will be covered by the conversion of users to full mobile data plans and by capacity payments still common in wireless. We calculate that in 2 years, though, this won’t be enough. That’s why mobile service-layer options are getting a lot of planning attention.

Mobile broadband has less capacity demand than fixed, and while mobile backhaul will be an important application, our research shows it to be shifting more decisively to Carrier Ethernet and also that the total capacity requirements for mobile backhaul are lower than those of enterprise Ethernet services or consumer wireline broadband and video.