How to Solve Backhaul Bottlenecks in Support of CAF Access Network Deployments

We are going to break existing paradigms and illustrate how to provide 10Gbps Full Duplex connections using E-band for distances up to 6 miles.

Broadband is coming to rural America!

In the summer of 2018, the?FCC announced the winners of the CAF2 auction . The awarded service providers will take advantage of over $1.5B dollars to improve the quantity and quality of broadband in rural America. The main difference in this auction versus the CAFI auction lies in the number of smaller service providers among the winners. The FCC encouraged service providers to focus on solutions that enable low latency and gigabit speeds, using these two metrics as a part of the scoring formula. But even those who will end up providing capacities in the tens or hundreds of Mbps to the end customer will definitely need a multi-gigabit transport to do so.

The transport infrastructure is a bottleneck

A significant percentage of the transport infrastructure, in particular in rural areas, rely on the traditional licensed microwave (MW) installed on towers to backhaul the access network.

These bands utilize narrow channels (25-50MHz) and typically are capable of providing just a few hundreds of Mbps which is clearly not sufficient to support the current capacity demands.?At very high modulations you might get 1Gbps out of the MW link, but the range will be short and the equipment expensive.?When it comes to $/Mbps mmWave technology outperforms MW by a large margin.

The most common bands for this application in rural America are 6, 11, and 18 GHz:

Figure 1: Number of links deployed in traditional MW bands (source: FCC)

But the main challenge is the availability of spectrum in these bands in general. Since several service providers that serve pretty much the same areas utilize the same towers, there are few to no available channels left to deploy additional microwave radios in these traditional licensed bands.

Read the rest of the article on our blog: How to Solve Backhaul Bottlenecks in Support of CAF Access Network Deployments