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Through various innovations, wireless transport technology has consistently surpassed capacity demands through 2G, 3G and 4G transitions and remains on trajectory to continue in a 5G network. Reliability of wireless backhaul products has never been better, and costs continue to decline especially relative to fiber-based options. From a product point of view, many good and reliable options exist that cover all frequency bands and form factors to solve the problem of backhaul, small cell and other sub-applications.
Primary backhaul challenges not product related
While products remain critical, today’s primary challenges for wireless transport are not product-related. Prevailing issues lie in cost and complexity associated with operational activities including:
Four operational obstacles of backhaul
In reality, technology does not constitute the main challenge for the deployment of wireless transmission. Operational issues remain the chief obstacles, which will only get worse—much worse. There are four reasons for this:
Backhaul industry lacks integrated, purpose-built solutions
The backhaul industry lacks integrated, purpose-built solutions to deal effectively with the growing operational complexity of wireless transport networks. That’s why we created AviatCloud.
As a software applications platform, AviatCloud automates and virtualizes networks and their operations with the ultimate goal of simplifying wireless transport. With custom-built applications to automate and virtualize various aspects of microwave design, deployment, management and service delivery, and by tying all the data together in one place, AviatCloud enables operators to spend less time managing data and more time enhancing their networks and improving customers’ experience. The data is leveraged on the back end across all applications to ensure seamless end-to-end processes and tools for the automation of microwave networks.
The first user of these capabilities will be Aviat Networks. We are putting these new capabilities to work across our various service components to optimize and grow our services business and strengthen our lead as the industry’s specialist provider of turnkey microwave solutions.
Clearly, there’s a huge opportunity to simplify wireless transport networks. However, beyond this, unless the industry addresses the operational issues associated with wireless connectivity, mobile operators will struggle to implement 5G networks in the future. We envisage AviatCloud as a platform that will massively improve the TCO associated with microwave networks going into the next decade.
AviatCloud is an evolving platform, and we welcome your feedback as we continue to roll out new software applications with goal of simplifying microwave.
Gary Croke
Sr. Dir. Marketing & Strategy
Aviat Networks