Mobile Backhaul Providers Must Make Important Ethernet Choices

CEN Feature (May 13 2010)

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   The mobile backhaul opportunity is largely a wholesale opportunity—and as incumbents, cable companies and competitive carriers build out Carrier Ethernet to cell sites to support the burgeoning demand for wireless capacity, they have to make important choices about what equipment to use and how to architect it. In making these choices, wholesale carriers are essentially placing bets on how many wholesale customers they’re likely to attract.

   
   Scott Knox, director of solutions development for Overture Networks, tells me the typical cell tower supports an average of about three wireless carriers. Even though there are multiple carriers at the tower, the backhaul provider may initially connect to the tower to serve only one of these carriers’. And as they bring service to their first customer at a tower, wholesale carriers can either build something to serve just that customer, then worry about the next one later--or aim higher, installing equipment and architecting it in a way that makes it easier to serve multiple customers.
   

   Carriers with a longer-term view—that have the confidence in the market and in their own capabilities—will prepare for future growth by installing a Carrier Ethernet access platform (CEAP) designed to serve multiple customers with flow level service creation and service assurance capabilities and dedicated queues per port and per flow to enable customer and services separation. If legacy TDM connections are also needed, the wholesale carrier will want to consider a device that can efficiently support that traffic using pseudowire over Ethernet capability.

   
   In today’s market, however, some carriers face severe capital limitations and are unwilling to spend anything beyond what’s needed to support their first wholesale customer. Those carriers may opt instead to install an Ethernet box that supports just one set of queues for the entire box, essentially limiting the box to supporting just a single customer. The carrier may even put the box in the customer’s cabinet, letting the customer pay for the expense of the enclosure, including power and HVAC. The downside is that the incremental cost of adding the next customer is a lot higher because another box will be required—and if the next customer doesn’t have space in its cabinet, the carrier will need to provide its own enclosure and power. Long-term maintenance costs also will be higher because there will be more boxes to support.
   

   But even when a wholesale carrier opts to forego spending on future customers until it gets them, there are steps it can take to minimize the amount of money it will have to spend in the future. An important one is to make sure the Ethernet box chosen can be connected in a ring configuration using G.8032 Ethernet ring technology with other boxes. This will help minimize fiber costs by eliminating the need to run a dedicated fiber connection to each box.

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