August 29, 2019
For years, E-Band has been touted as the next big thing. Likewise, 80GHz technology and solutions have been around for several years, yet the demand has not taken off. Why is that? Well, there are a few excellent reasons:
While traditional microwave has been a valuable backhaul alternative for years, the spectrum availability and channel widths inherently mean these bands will have difficulty scaling capacity to meet the needs of 5G – approaching and exceeding 10Gbps.
5G is all about use cases which promise to be new revenue streams for the operator and are critical for operator financial success. Many of these use cases deal with critical applications (connected/autonomous cars, industrial IOT, M2M, public safety applications, etc.), which require very high availability from the transport networks. Due to the above issues, many people question whether or not E-Band has the availability to ubiquitously support 5G and its mission critical use cases.
These issues come down to one main theme – traditional wireless transport options lack the capacity and availability for wide-scale deployments for 5G networks.
Multi-Band involves combining E-Band (70-80GHz) with traditional microwave (6-42GHz) on a single microwave link, usually with a single antenna on each end. Multi-Band drastically improves availability and distance of E-Band links and addresses other issues like pole sway and antenna alignment.
For such critical, high capacity 5G links, poor availability is not acceptable. Multi-Band offers a promising solution to address the shortcomings of E-Band and deliver a high capacity, reliable option for 5G transport. Benefits of Multi-Band include:
Multi-band also offers a solution to address the shortcomings of traditional microwave (15/18/23GHz) where current capacity levels are not sufficient. Benefits of Multi-Band include:
Most Multi-Band solutions on the market are complex and costly, requiring 2, 3 or even 4 separate boxes. Plus, these solutions offer no easy way to plan and design new complex Multi-Band links.
Aviat has the industry’s only viable Multi-Band option – including a single box Multi-Band radio with direct antenna mount as well as the industry’s first and only Multi-Band link design solution in Aviat Design.
The bottom line:
With Aviat’s single box Multi-Band solution, you can significantly improve capacity by up to 10x (compared to traditional microwave) and virtually eliminate outages (when compared to e-band). At a cost that makes sense… Why would you not consider that?