July 15, 2020

Digicel and Aviat establish 166km link in Papua New Guinea between its two largest cities

In 2015, PNG outlined its Vision 2050, committing the government to promote the social and economic development of the nation by that date. National leaders spoke of W.W. Rostow’s five-stage model of development. The second of those stages is all important: the building of infrastructure necessary for the success of all sectors of economic and social life, which includes manufacturing, technology, transportation, and communication. With Aviat’s help, the modernization program would receive its infrastructure boost, with more secure uptime over a critical backbone between its two largest cities. In addition to PNG’s focus on modernization, they struggled with unreliable, existing backbone links with consistent outages and harsh terrain covered with dense rainforest. This terrain can be challenging when trying to establish a communications backbone. Fiber would not be practical or affordable in this type of situation, wireless would truly be the best answer.

Aviat and Digicel’s solution would establish three sites and two links to bypass three remote sites with four links. To implement and maintain the new sites, Aviat’s field team used every transportation means available—including helicopters, boats, buses, and cars. Despite these challenges, the Aviat team had the new links up and running according to schedule. Installation and testing took ten days, and the link was officially completed on May 18, 2020 with live traffic flowing on May 20.

Using Aviat’s WTM 4000 technology was a crucial component to the success of Digicel’s solution strategy. The WTM 4500 is ideal for applications that require ultra-reliable links over long and difficult paths, such as flat desert terrains or large bodies of water in excess of 100 kilometers, where highly reflective conditions can play havoc with a microwave link, potentially causing extended outages. Aviat installed two antennas of 1.8m size at each end of the 166 kilometers link to implement a space diversity strategy. Transmission paths were separated by optimal height to ensure the path reliability and additional capacity.