Intracom Telecom has designed and developed the UltraLink™-BX70 E-Band radio to fully meet the particular needs of the broadband access market segment for a radio system with performance comparable to optical fiber, at a price point suitable for the access connectivity business model.
UltraLink™-BX70, an ultra-compact, all-outdoor Ethernet radio operating in the 71-76 GHz part of the E-Band spectrum, is ideally suited for use in cost-sensitive, high-capacity applications.
Operating in TDD mode, UltraLink™-BX70 can offer flexibility and efficiency in the delivery of services with asymmetric traffic profiles, such as broadband access or camera backhaul services. It achieves throughputs of up to 1.6 Gbit/s aggregate, while offering a complete set of Carrier Ethernet networking features to deliver standardized SLA-enabling services.
UltraLink™-BX70 is designed to be easily mounted on poles and lamp posts (up to 300 mm in diameter), to enable convenience and speed of installation in traditional telco, as well as, street-level environments. UltraLink™-BX70 perfectly meets the demands of applications such as: last-mile delivery of wireless Gigabit To The Home / Building / Premises (GTTH/B/P) services, Gigabit connectivity services to SMEs and larger enterprises, connectivity for government / public service buildings, utilities & industrial complexes, university campus building interconnection, security camera and Wi-Fi access point backhaul.
UltraLink™-BX70 offers a number of highly-valued features, which are elaborated below:
UltraLink™-BX70's 1.6Gbit/s aggregate L1 Ethernet capacity is achieved by combining an industry-high spectral efficiency (using 256-QAM modulation) with bandwidth optimization in a 250MHz-wide channel. High spectral efficiency enables the use of narrower channels, which incur reduced license fees in countries where fees are applicable. Operation in narrower channels also increases the overall number of available channel options in a band, which allows for denser link deployments through the reduction of frequency reuse and facilitation of RF planning for interference minimization.
Operating in TDD mode, UltraLink™-BX70 can, time-wise, allocate the use of the spectral resources in a way that it optimally matches the downlink/uplink traffic profile. This improves the link spectral efficiency, with respect to FDD systems, for the delivery of services with asymmetric traffic profiles.
UltraLink™-BX70's 7-level Hitless Adaptive Modulation and Coding can provide seamless system gain & capacity trade-off to enable highest capacity/spectral efficiency for most of the time and continuous link operation under adverse propagation conditions.
The UltraLink™-BX70 radio unit features two Gigabit Ethernet ports and an embedded Carrier Ethernet Bridge, which allows deployment in complex network topologies such as, branched access distribution networks and protected ring topologies with add-drop functionality, without requiring additional switching equipment. When the delivery of business-critical services requires high availability, UltraLink™-BX70 can be deployed in ring configurations with fast protection, using the ITU-T G.8032v2 ERP standard protocol.
Support of Service OAM, based on the IEEE 802.1ag and ITU-T G.8013/Y.1731 standards, and Link OAM, based on IEEE 802.3ah standard, means that UltraLink™-BX70 is capable of offering Carrier-grade Ethernet OAM features, enabling operators to provide manageable L2 end-to-end services to their customers.
UltraLink™-BX70 offers per-service QoS treatment of the transported traffic based on L1, L2 and L3 classifiers. Strict priority (SP), Weighted Round Robin (WRR), Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ) or Hybrid SP+WRR/WFQ scheduling schemes are cleverly applied to eight CoS / queues to enable the most suitable prioritization treatment for critical management, control plane or time sensitive traffic, while supporting revenue-generating service differentiation for user plane. Colour-aware WRED is applied as a means to gracefully manage potential queue congestion. Furthermore, policing and shaping are applied to the incoming/outgoing service flows allowing the definition and conformance of services to the desired profiles.
UltraLink™-BX70 is a lightweight, zero-footprint, all-outdoor system that offers deployment flexibility and ease for deployment on towers, rooftops as well as street-level environments. With its small form-factor ODUs (200 x 200 x 30 mm) and specially-designed mounting bracket, the UltraLink™-BX70 radios can easily be deployed on poles and even lamp posts with diameters of up to 300 mm. Configuration options with low-cost Class 2, 30 cm direct mount antennas, as well as, high-performance Class 3, 30 cm or 60 cm parabolic antennas, are available to cater for any deployment scenario.
The use of E-Band radios can enable offering Gigabit connectivity when fibre is not available and its installation is incompatible to suitable time-to-market or is financially infeasible. This is particularly relevant since many regulators around the world have favoured the use of E-Band spectrum with light licensing procedures and low license fees.
INTRACOM TELECOM proposes the use of its UltraLink-BX70 native Ethernet E-Band radio to Fixed Wireless Access operators/WISPs/ISPs, to further enhance the business case of offering Gigabit access/connectivity to houses and businesses. UltraLink-BX70 is a cost optimised E-Band radio using TDD mode, to suit cost-sensitive asymmetrical traffic applications such as GTTH and Enterprise connectivity via Wireless.
Using high degree of electronic component integration and taking advantage of the fact that TDD radio equipment does not include expensive RF components, such as duplexers, UltraLink-BX70 can offer low cost Gigabit connectivity.
Ultralink-BX70 is small-sized and lightweight unit easily installed and commissioned to allow quick and easy deployment. It comes with a lightweight custom-designed antenna to further facilitate deployment for the last mile applications and lower the overall pole space and associated rental fee (if applicable). Furthermore, it offers minimal power consumption, to lower the power –related OpEx, while delivering Gbps connectivity.
It is well known that in most access broadband systems (wired and wireless) the information flow is asymmetrical with much higher capacity flowing from network side to the user (due to dominant streaming applications). When asymmetric traffic patterns exist, less spectrum is needed in TDD duplexing mode than FDD mode to achieve the same traffic transport result. This is because in FDD mode of operation the amount of spectrum used is symmetrical in both directions i.e. the High and Low spectrum parts of an FDD channel are of the same size. In FDD mode the channel size required for a particular use case is determined by the direction with the highest capacity demand. This leaves the opposite, lower traffic, direction with underutilised (wasted) spectrum. In TDD mode there are no High and Low spectrum parts in a channel and the channel can be time-shared asymmetrically. The traffic-carrying capability of UltraLink-BX70 per direction can be configured in various different rations to better fit the actual bi-directional traffic pattern.
A growing number of countries worldwide have opted to allow TDD operation mode in E-Band (Russia, U.S.A, United Kingdom, Australia, Italy, Greece, and others). When the fixed service providers select TDD mode of operation they use only half the amount of spectrum that is allocated on a standard FDD channel allocation of the same nominal size. To encourage the fair and efficient use of spectrum some regulators offer spectrum fees that are proportional to the overall amount of spectrum utilised by the user, resulting in a more competitive pricing of license fees for TDD operation over FDD operation. In these cases the network operator can save on the yearly license fee related OpEx.
All the above discussed cost elements lead to smaller Total cost of ownership (TCO) of deployment using TDD systems than FDD systems and will thus enable more cost-effective Fixed Wireless Access / GTTH business models for fixed wireless access operators /ISPs/WISPs. This capability may be especially critical for operators who may not have the critical infrastructure, the time to market or the financial means to deploy or lease fibre in order to compete with large players in the market.
From the point of view of RF planning and co-existence of FDD and TDD E-Band links there are no additional problems arising in allowing the TDD mode of operation in the E-Band additionally to the FDD mode. This issue is comprehensively treated in the measurements-backed E-Band “FDD-TDD Coexistence study” document. The study examines all E-Band radio system type deployment combinations: FDD/FDD, FDD/TDD and TDD/TDD and demonstrates that the deployment of E-Band radio systems operating in FDD and/or TDD modes is feasible, even when sharing the same rooftop and even when sharing the same pole by following some simple and feasible installation rules, as long as co-channel operation is avoided. Field measurements show that no guard band is needed between the different E-Band systems of any type (FDD or TDD) following these rules. Therefore, first adjacent channel operation between systems of any duplexing type is possible. The study details the rules and guidelines for deploying E-Band systems of any duplexing mode.”