At a December press event in Huntsville, Alabama, ADTRAN (News - Alert) and one of its customers discussed the current and future state of mobile backhaul. ADTRAN has a big stake in the field since it has equipment in “plus 90 percent” of the cellular carriers in North America, according to Kurt Raaflaub, Product Manager for Carrier Ethernet & Optical Solutions, including the top 8 U.S. LECs/RBOCs.
A typical cell site needs about as much bandwidth as a medium-sized business these days, said Kurt, with those T-1s aforementioned at 1.5 Mbps being the former standard to add voice and data capacity. The problem with T-1s is that buying bandwidth in 1.5 Mbps chunks doesn’t scale very well between the copper pairs and all that gear per T-1 to support.
If you're running a cell tower today, the name of the game is migrating to new optical – fiber – solutions with Ethernet. Initially, carriers are decoupling voice and data, adding more data capacity and running two separate network segments.
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Somewhere down the road, voice traffic will move onto the data network, but that process will be slow, says Vijay Lewis of FiberTower, an ADTRAN customer and operator of 3,100 cell sites around the country. Inserting cellular voice on an IP data network requires precise timing and the industry is still formulating standards, with two different standards in the works for LTE (News - Alert).
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Lewis predicts a seamless merger of voice and data at the cell tower is four years out and you'll still have T-1s five years from now at cell towers. Not helping matters are a small “die hard” group of TDM users who don't understand Ethernet and IP and just keep throwing T-1s at the problem.
Verizon (News - Alert) and LTE are driving significant bandwidth demand to cell towers. While smaller cellular carriers are “happy” with 20 to 50 Mbps of capacity at a tower, Lewis anticipates having to provide a minimum of 100 Mbps per tower in 2011 and up to 300 Mbps in five years, due to LTE deployments. Cell carriers are looking for less than 1 millisecond of jitter and less than 2 milliseconds of one-way latency on a network to support VoIP and streaming video.
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