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NEWS
BACKHAUL UP FRONT AND
CENTER TODAY DUE TO 3G/4G DEPLOYMENTS
Backhaul, looking back at the Telecommunications Act of 1996
and the move to digital mobile wireless throughout the world both previous and
post 1996, was an important component of the growing mobile wireless network. But
backhaul seemed particularly unglamorous. Providing backhaul was akin to being
part of the cable television revolution of the 1980s by providing the fiber for
the newer star-hub plants. An important piece to the network, but one that was
just assumed was accounted for.
Today, due to the proliferation of 3G networks and the
expected roll-out of 4G networks as well as the increasing backhaul capacity
needed between mobile network components, backhaul has become as an attractive story as
that of the progress being made daily on the air interface front.
CHALLENGES
Edge of the Network
Needs Climbing
Mobile network capacity requirements at the edge of the
network are rapidly moving upward and yielding demands of from 20 Mbps to 50
Mbps per base station for mobile wireless networks utilizing HSPA, variants of
CDMA2000 EV-DO or WiMAX.
These higher capacity needs are resulting in a replacement of radio links with fiber, in some cases, but mostly in the addition of wireless capacity for backhaul and replacement of wireline with wireless backhaul in the US and Europe. These have been trends evident during the past few years and continue in 2009 and are largely the reason the wireless backhaul industry has been doing so well lately.
Mobile networks are just going to become more needy as far as backhaul capacity goes since LTE (WCDMA Long Term Evolution) and 802.16m (an evolved version of WiMAX expected to be deployed in 2012) will push edge of cell base station capacity requirements to from 100 Mbps to 300 Mbps in the 2011-2013 time frame. These figures all assume support for legacy services.
These deployments will create new bottlenecks at aggregation points within cellular networks.
Middle of the Network
Needs Also Climbing
These are typically connections between base stations and/or
base station collector points and BSCs and, in some cases, connections between
BSCs themselves and BSCs to MSCs. In a
WCDMA network the components are the radio network controller (RNC) and core
network, rather than the BSC and MSC.
These aggregate links, regardless of their name, will over the next five years require capacity in excess of 1 Gbps, a capacity which challenges the traditional limitations of traditional microwave technology/economics.
Overall base station sites in established mobile wireless
markets will need lots of backhaul capacity. For example, in the United States
Visant Strategies sees less than 5% of sites in the middle of the decade
utilizing less than 10 Mbps while at the same point in time 65% of all base
station sites in the United States will be utilizing (or should be) 45 Mbps to
155 Mbps and over 155 Mbps in backhaul capacity.
SOLUTIONS
Upper Millimeter
Being Successfully Used and More to Come
Both in the U.S.
and abroad, governmental bodies have been looking at new regulatory models for
allocating upper millimeter microwave spectrum to users. The intent of most
regulators is to relax licensing requirements or to eliminate them entirely so
as to permit new services to be developed quickly and in the absence of the
financial resources required today to occupy most of the licensed bands in the
lower microwave bands.
Due to the relative lack of prior applications and services in these frequency ranges, governments have seen fit to allocate very generous amounts of spectrum to users of these new bands. A full 5 gigahertz is provided in the 60GHz spectrum, and the two E-bands located in the 70 and 80GHz regions span 5GHz apiece and are normally allocated in pairs for a total of 10GHz.
Upper millimeter microwave is not the first wireless technology to promise and to actually deliver very high throughputs. The free space optical (FSO) contingent was doing that some fifteen years ago using laser light propagated through the atmosphere. Prototype FSO transceivers achieved throughputs exceeding 160 gigabits per second under laboratory conditions, and commercial systems handily exceeded a gigabit per second, and yet the technology languished in the marketplace, never extending much beyond a few niche applications. Why might upper millimeter microwave radio be any different?
Principally because the availability of upper millimeter microwave air links tends to be higher than is the case for their FSO counterparts, particularly for E-band and W-band radios. W-band radios have been successfully operated over distances of miles whereas FSO links usually span but a few hundred yards. And FSO systems are peculiarly vulnerable to fog which may completely interrupt the signal in some instances.
Furthermore, upper millimeter microwave radios, while still relatively expensive today compared to lower frequency microwave equipment, appear poised to ride the same diminishing price curve as the latter which confers upon them a further advantage over FSO. Upper millimeter microwave radios also do not pose the same kind of setup and alignment problems optical systems do.
Currently, upper millimeter microwave radios cannot match the highest throughputs achieved experimentally with FSO systems, but at least one manufacturer has reported a 10 gigabit per second throughput from a single radio. Complex modulation techniques are able to be achieved with present day component technology; however, given the susceptibility of transmissions in these frequency ranges to fades induced by adverse atmospheric conditions, the sacrifice in range and/or availability attendant upon advanced modulation might not be acceptable. This remains to be seen. Still, the near term potential for 40 gigabit per second radios exists even if market demand for such speeds is not now apparent.
Upper and Lower
Frequencies Still King
Use of upper millimeter microwave radio in mobile wireless
networks throughout the world will not mean that vendors of radios in the lower
frequencies will suffer sales; in fact traditional PTP vendors can expect to
see a close to a 33 % increase in sales and revenues over the next five years
while overall upper millimeter vendors will experience greater success as well.
Upper Millimeter microwave shipments for backhaul, according
to Visant Strategies, will more than double between 2009 and 2010 and will
expand globally by a factor of 20 by 2015. Of course upper millimeter microwave
vendors have just recently started moving radios for backhaul use, so obviously
the 20 times growth has to be viewed in perspective, but it will still be very
impressive to see the upper millimeter microwave radio vendors turn mobile
wireless backhaul into a near quarter-billion dollar market during the next
five years. And, as the world goes even more wireless, that number will
continue to grow.
OPPORTUNITIES
Established and
Emerging Markets Will Both Help Fuel Growth
While we have mentioned that it is the evolving 3G and 4G
networks that will place much of the newer backhaul capacity need between
network elements, the growth of non-muscular voice networks in emerging markets
will also push the need for more backhaul.
Some of these networks will also see an increase in the backhaul capacity needs, but mostly will account for a business as usual for lower frequency PTP vendors and possible new business accounts for the upper millimeter PTP vendors.
Many of these emerging markets will account for the increase of almost 4.5 million base stations deployed today to the slightly over 6 million base stations deployed in the middle of next decade.
Growth for PTP
Vendors
Growing mobile networks worldwide have had a substantial
impact upon those already feeding the need for mobile backhaul, primarily
point-to-point microwave vendors as well as those providing fiber, particularly
in urban areas, for wireless backhaul.
For example, the PTP microwave industry has experienced unprecedented growth in both units shipped and in sales, averaging and increase for both over 20% per year since 2006. This resulted in a $5.1 billion dollar market in 2007 and a projected $6.2 billion market in 2008.
Now that's glamorous.
© 2009, Visant Strategies