Backhaul


Facing up to London’s capacity crunch


Will mobile operators be ready to handle this summer’s peak traffi c? Gaby Junowicz, of Siklu, considers the technical challenges posed by the London Olympic Games


that the communications infrastructure is ready to meet the demands of both home and visiting nations. With an estimated 450 000 staying visitors


W


and 5½ million day visitors due to descend upon London during the Games, many of them armed with smartphones and high expectations, questions have been raised on how well prepared we are to meet the challenges of what is being described as the ‘capacity crunch’. In September, the Mayor of London warned


that the Games will push the 3G capacity of London’s network to its limits. Taking place pre- dominantly in a highly-populated urban area, the Games will pose some unique challenges for those tasked with ensuring that there is adequate capacity, at a time when mobile data traffi c is already increasing at an alarmingly fast rate. Ex- perts now predict that by 2015 the volume of data traffi c will reach 6·3 billion gigabytes per month, two-thirds of which will be generated by users accessing video.¹ T e installation of thousands of small cells as


part of a multi-layered mobile access network has already been proposed as a solution to deliver


About the author Gaby Junowicz


is vice-president for marketing and business development for the wireless backhaul


company Siklu. Siklu’s


all-silicon


EtherHaul radios deliver Gigabit speeds over the uncongested millimetric wave and E-band spectrum at a cost claimed to be 80 per cent lower than competing solutions


LAND mobile January 2011


ith just six months to go before the London 2012 Olympics get under- way, plans continue apace to ensure


the coverage and capacity that London will re- quire. But what are the issues that this will solve, and what additional network infrastructure con- siderations need to be made for this to be a viable solution?


Big problem, small solution T inking back to the Beijing Olympics in 2008, just one in 50 people used mobile phones to fol- low the action – whereas today, almost half of UK Internet users go online via mobile phone data connections, which means demand this time could be excessively higher. T e demand for data-hungry services is only


going to be exacerbated by the arrival of 4G, so whilst there is an immediacy, in the short term, posed by the countdown to the Games, we should not overlook the longer term issue of data capacity, particularly in urban areas. For London to off er suffi cient LTE mobile


broadband by 2015, it is predicted that 70 000 small cells will need to be installed across the capital, including 2000 nodes covering the Un- derground network.² Small cells, picocells and microcells are cur-


rently being used by operators to boost capac- ity for a number of reasons: they off er a more cost-eff ective option with a small footprint, low power consumption and they are easy to trans- port and install. T e growth of the market was underlined by a


recent report published by ABI Research which indicated that, though still in the early stages of development, by 2016 the outdoor picocell mar- ket will reach $8 billion in global revenues.³ T inking ahead to the Games, the density


of London’s population means that small cells, deployed in the most congested areas, are an ef- fective option for operators because most of the cells can be installed at street level on lamp posts, traffi c lights and wall mounts. T is off ers a more practical approach for deployment in the heart of London. However, whilst small cells will provide the


high capacity in the access network, they must be supported by a backhaul network which is


optimized for a high capacity, short range back- haul links.


The backhaul solution Whilst small cell deployments deliver many ad- vantages, they are not without challenges. Tradi- tionally, a major bottleneck in the provision of bandwidth within any network ecosystem has been the backhaul, the ‘last mile’ between the base station and the operator point of presence. Due to the very nature of where they will be deployed, fi xed line options such as fi bre tech- nology are not always a viable option for small cell network infrastructures, which means that designing wireless backhaul infrastructures that combine low cost, with a small form factor and high throughput, is key. One such solution could be off ered in the


form of millimetre-wave spectrum backhaul links which can deliver high volume at a low price. New silicon-based engineering is off ering high capacity, lower power consumption and a small footprint. Operating in 57–64 GHz spec- trum, these solutions also provide the advantages of small antenna design, whilst the abundant spectrum availability allows very high, gigabit per second capacity and oxygen attenuation to reduce the risk of interference. Whilst the Olympics Games are a short term


challenge for operators they, nonetheless, serve as a timely reminder that our mobile networks need to evolve to become multi-layered access networks to provision for the additional and on- going demand for data intensive services. With small cell deployments looking set to become a key focus in the next few years, new backhaul solutions are now off ering a way for operators to provide next generation services in urban de- ployments, without eroding profi t margins.


1. ICBI: T e 4th Annual Mobile Money and Migrant Remittances Event – Pre-Conference Workshop.


2. Radio-Electronics.com: London Needs 70,000 Small Cells for Mobile Broadband.


3. ABI Research: Mobile Infrastructure Research. 23


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