It’s pretty simple – network operators need to build more capacity to support active or future planned deployments of 5G. Even operators who don’t see 5G on the horizon yet are facing new capacity demands, whether they have 4G/LTE networks or are delivering rural broadband services using fixed wireless access.
Is traditional microwave dead? With the advent of Multi-Band, it could be. Why accept an old solution when you can have so much more by combining E-Band and traditional microwave into a single-box unit. Governments are taking action across the world to connect homes and businesses in rural areas to the rest of the world. From the 7-year action plan devised by National Broadband Ireland (NBI) to the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) $9.2 billion newly implemented Rural Digital Opportunity Fund, there is a worldwide focus on the connectedness of rural areas. As capacity demands increase rapidly for rural broadband networks, a better solution than traditional microwave is needed.
When it comes to delivering the best in wireless backhaul solutions, Aviat sets the bar high, and now we have been selected as one of the “best-positioned suppliers” for the OpenSoftHaul (OSH) global RFI sponsored by Telecom Infra Project’s Wireless Backhaul Project Group (WBH PG).
Some multi-box Multi-Band solutions currently available on the market fail to provide a seamless switchover between the traditional microwave and E-band frequencies when the E-band portion becomes unavailable—leading to reduced capacity and the need for manual intervention to correct the link’s performance.
Jeremy Ranch Golf & Country Club is in the Upper East Canyon of the Wasatch Mountains, on the outskirts of Park City, Utah. The Jeremy Ranch facility overlooks the rapidly expanding East Canyon Creek region, which includes Park City. To serve this growing community, Wicked Fast Internet looked for a way to provide high-capacity services to residents and businesses. They wanted to keep costs down and make sure that the selected technology would accommodate newly emerging high-capacity services, population growth, and geographical expansion.
Randy Jenkins, Aviat Networks’ Director of Business Development for North America, attended the “5G Transport & the Edge” meeting of technology leaders in New York on October 10. He sat on the microwave transport in the 5G environment panel, titled “Redefining the Access Network: Examining RAN Architecture & the Implications for 5G Transport.”
Author: Stuart Little, Director, International Product Line Marketing
Have you heard the buzz about Multi-Band? Multi-Band combines traditional microwave channel alongside an E-Band (80 GHz) channel, joining the capacity of the latter with the high availability of the former. Multi-Band makes E-Band carrier-class over longer distances, making it a much more viable and deployable solution for 5G backhaul.
Aviat Design, Aviat’s cloud-based link planning application, supports WTM 4800 E-Band and Multi-band designs. Aviat Design is the industry’s first and only integrated Multi-band link design solution showing a combined view of availability and capacity for the link. This enables easy, fast, intuitive E-Band and Multi-Band designs (all specs included, no pathloss files to download or update, easy cloud access). Popular design tools will require 2 separate link calculations for Multi-Band, and will not result in a combined design for the link, making it virtually impossible to understand the expected link performance or capacity or estimate the proper antenna size. Aviat Design is FREE for use at www.aviatcloud.com.
By Stuart Little, Director of International Product Line Marketing, US
5G is coming (and hopefully it won’t be accompanied by White Walkers) and will bring with it tremendous challenges for network operators, and no less critical will be backhaul, where needed capacities will grow from the hundreds of Megabits to multiple Gigabits. In their latest Microwave Outlook (from December 2017), Ericsson forecasts that by 2022 the typical backhaul requirement for a high-capacity radio site will be in the around 1 Gbps, increasing to as much as 5 Gbps towards 2025.
Photo credit: Foter / CC BY-SA
As the telecom community searches for reasons why Small Cell architectures have not yet launched en masse, “experts” are quick to suggest that lack of backhaul technology as the key perpetrator.
Because of need for higher capacities, the trend toward shorter link distances for mobile backhaul and declining product costs, 70/80GHz (i.e., E-band) solutions are gathering significant interest for mobile backhaul and enterprise access applications. However, because these frequencies are new to most people, there is little understanding of costs and other issues related to licensing the 70-80GHz spectrum.