Microwave PtMP backhaul equipment market is expected to surpass US$ 300 million by 2017

Microwave PtMP  backhaul equipment market is expected to surpass US$ 300 million by 2017
PtMP licensed backhaul equipment is still in contention as a high-capacity technology for small cell backhaul

Athens, Greece and London, UK, 22 February 2013 – Point to Multipoint (PtMP) microwave backhaul shipments decreased 6% in Q4 2012 over Q1 2012, but a sustainable two-digit Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) is forecasted by 2017, according to ExelixisNet’s latest report, “PtMP Backhaul Market for LTE and small cells”.

The relentless demand for network backhaul capacity is making mobile operators consider every possible option for efficient, sustainable backhaul solutions. Licensed point to multi-point microwave solutions continued to make inroads as an alternative to conventional wireless backhaul albeit a major European network breakthrough has still not occurred. Concerns over interference, spectrum availability and service guarantee issues, continue to present barriers for widespread adoption for PtMP. The breakthrough may not be that far away however with many operators looking seriously at PtMP solutions for small cell backhaul. “The new all-outdoor licensed-band radios look very efficient and competitive, even in the emerging 42 GHz band, compared to the NLOS solutions,  and are expected to become a key asset for backhaul links between lamp posts and the sides of buildings where small cells will be installed,” said Elias Aravantinos, author of the report and ExelixisNet Leading Analyst. The new outdoor small cell PtmP solutions will be tested during 2013 not only to prove whether they can deliver ease of installation, attractive form factor, and improved traffic handling benefits but also to evaluate whether the predicted lower overall cost of ownership (TCO) can be realized.

The wireless PtMP backhaul equipment market is expected to surpass US$300 million by 2017, almost 3-fold growth from 2012 to 2017. ExelixisNet believes the overall PtMP wireless backhaul equipment market growth will reach its profitable peak early 2014, even 5-fold growth as a really high forecast, as the PtmP solutions could serve the small cell market’s uptake in a very satisfying, efficient and economic level, as described in the report.

Drawing from in-depth interviews with backhaul vendors and operators worldwide, the report provides a detailed look at licensed microwave PtMP backhaul technology, spectrum, and investment and market trends.

Selected Key Findings:

• Middle East is the fastest growing region for Ptmp microwave shipments between 2011 and 2012
• Africa maintained a continuous demand pace between 2011 and 2012, but Latin America is expected to uptake in the next 5-years
• Shipments of radios in the 26GHz band represented 47% of total shipments in H2 2011, a surprising increase of 100% from the previous half
• Lack of progress is observed in European Markets
• CBNL managed to maintain 50% of the market share mainly due to strong ongoing business in the Middle East and Africa.
• Intracom Telecom’s innovative small cell backhaul solution is expected to become a key player in the near future
• Hughes and its satellite solutions remain very attractive especially when securing communication during natural disasters
• Bluwan managed to turn the spinoff into a sustainable companyand a key player in delivering high speed and high capacity Point to Multipoint wireless backhaul

ExelixisNet is a global consulting firm focusing on LTE and broadband wireless technologies, regulation and other technologies and markets.

Press Contact:
Elias Aravantinos, Leading Analyst
Email: earavantinos@exelixisnet.com
Tel: (+30)6949732009

7 facts about the upcoming #MWC13

In about a month Barcelona will host the biggest and most exciting event and show of the year, the Mobile World Congress 2013 (25-28 February 2013). It is the 8^th consistent year that the event takes place in Barcelona and will continue till 2018. But what are some facts you need to know about this year’s event?

1. The change of venue might cause some issues to the visitors that were used to the previous central and very convenient location but also knew very well their way through the Halls. You should be ready to dive into the unknown. However the new venue (Fira de Barcelona’s Gran Via map) located close to the airport, although it will be hard to reach, no metro around just some buses, it is 30% larger than the previous one (94,000 sqm)
2. GSMA reports 10% more bookings than last year
3. 140 government representatives (for the first time) are expected to raise interest about spectrum issues and regulation, crucial for the smooth mobile market’s operation
4. Samsung  is expected to launch officially  the Galaxy Note 8 inch tablet, as Samsung’s mobile head JK Shin recently confirmed. It includes quad-core processor, 2GB RAM, 1280x800 resolution and 5MP rear camera.
5. The Near Field Communication (NFC) setup and experience is expected to assist the visitors with new applications. NFC center and interactive zones will allow the visitors to collect information about the exhibition venues, locations, events, places of interest etc. Interesting and progressive feature, however NFC is not supported from all smartphones.
6. The GSMA Connected City is one of the event’s highlights. A real city’s street will show how advanced mobile services can promote innovation, economic growth and new business ideas. The solutions will be supplied from AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, GSMA, KT, Telenor and Vodafone.
7. Greece, for the first time, will participate with its own national kiosk, sending the message, “Technology born in Greece goes global”, where 25 Greek startups and businesses will present their products and services.

Source: ExelixisNet, http://exelixisnet.com/?p=437

An all built-in 2012 presented flat growth for the microwave industry

Mobile operators continue to invest heavily in LTE networks during 2012 and towards 2013 offering more capacity to their 3G subscribers, very often they face the difficult task of choosing solutions that will allow them to seamlessly maintain their businesses during the transition to pure packet networks. The several microwave solutions are a good and cost effective option. These solutions across different frequencies and architectures are able to maintain enough capacity to ensure superb Quality of Experience (QoE) for end users as the demand for data consumption continues to grow.

2012 has been a very dynamic year, with lots of competition among vendors, where operators are as always  in the driver’s seat evaluating and maintaining two or even more microwave suppliers in quiet aggressive agreements. Lots of reforming and new products anticipating either an aggressive small cells evolution or faster LTE networks deployment. Overall it’s been a flat year (2012) with a small increase in the basket of shipped links or contracts for most microwave suppliers when other especially the exclusive E-Band suppliers managed to sustain business.

Magic boxes, amazing toolkits and long haul tails empowering small cells backhauling

By Elias Aravantinos

Cost effective solutions and future radios planning in respect to NGMN guidelines and not only were discussed during the 2-days event of Packet Microwave and Backhaul Forum organized in London by Layer 123. Backhaul remains a commercial and technical challenge, where many intelligent solutions could be provided reserving simplicity as Everything Everywhere (EE) highlighted. Operators and vendors had the chance to exchange concerns, identify issues and solutions to push mobile backhaul and small cells further down the road. All technologies were discussed and debated, from Point-to-Point (PtP) and Point-to-multipoint (PmP) to NLOS (Non-Line-of-sight) and high performance V-band and E-band solutions. The products exhibition helped the attendees to get a better idea of form factors, size and feel but also look into some demo data as presented from the big microwave players such as Alcatel-Lucent and NEC. Even North American vendors were actively participating such as Bridgewave and Aviat Networks.

Huawei presented its brand new E-Band solution, expected to be launched even earlier this year, a full outdoor radio performing a throughput of up to 2.5 Gbps, (over 250 MHz channels), which will be further improved to a fiber-like capacity of 10 Gbps or higher. It is ideal to support ‘pipe’ channel or similar capacity demanded situations. It attracted lots of attention and expected to have an impact to the industry till the upcoming WMC in February 2013. 

Other vendors, exhibited also their millimeter wave radios, such as Sub10, SIAE and Siklu. Traditional PMP vendors, Cambridge Broadband Networks and Intracom Telecom presented also small cells solutions, with the latter getting some more attention on the new concept, the ‘WiBAS metro node’ solution for small cells backhauling introducing a single piece of equipment for a single band. Perhaps some joint force is needed to prove the PmP business case, because just the ‘less equipment’ argument might not be enough anymore from an industry’s voice perspective. Big vendors like Alcatel Lucent continue to examine the PmP technology investigating other vendors’ solutions, looking into partnerships as in the past they did with CBNL for a customer’s request. This time though is looking more intensively into Radwin’s radios that seem to have a better fit and a partnership could be possible along pre-defined terms.

Along news concepts was also CommScope, a well-respected antenna producer (300,000 units per year) holding more than 50% of backhaul traffic, thinking beyond class 4 antennas – which allows better use of ACM - to flat antennas, could even called class 5 that could gain more than 84% in efficiency within a cost of a couple of hundreds of dollars. Bluwan as always was there discussing millimeter wave PMP with their brand new CTO but also BlinQ Networks discussing sub 6 GHz NLOS solutions and a comparison TCO case study, expecting to play a key role in the toolkit approach. However although these two companies have completed a series of trials, there is still no proof, case studies or articles on discussing the results in an either technical or business approach.

Thus all these small factors magic boxes, with all this continuous reengineering and strict guidelines and performances are looking for some light in the end of the tunnel, revenues, when today the mall cells volume still remains in a few thousands level . High density areas will expect to form ecosystems hosting a toolklit approach, where several technologies could co-exist (i.e PmP and 60GHz etc) in order to achieve the best performance and cost effective sites. QoS, QoE, capacity and coverage could definitely be the drivers to that. Additionally, the new innovative services, M2M and cloud might also ask for high performance networks.

A few cases studies were presented trying to coin the small cell economics with some cost and ratio analysis between the macro and microcell level.  A 1:11 or 1:5 ratio could be possibly a good guess, in a macro-to-micro ratio, with the small cells in the near future to follow a 10-20% of the macrocells’ cost, as EE mentioned. The small cells locations would need additional planning to capture as much traffic as they can. Definitely, anyone could argue with these numbers but we are still in the early stages of small cells backhauling and deployment, expected to pick up by mid-2014. The big argument is that if the macrocells are 25% utilized, how much will be the small cells? If we take as an example the city of London, tons of people go in and out the city daily for work. In that sense, traffic will appear in bursts, where the small cells radios might remain idle overnight. That’s a good reason to make the operators align only into low cost solutions for small cells, satisfying certain peaks during the day.

Long haul solutions are also of high interest, especially the effort to migrate whole networks first to SDH and later to packet traffic. Ceragon, the microwave specialist, is digging “Terabit on the beach”, in Africa, mentioning that long haul networks could offer reduced TCO and spectral efficiency. However long haul is not the major operators concern these days, but in a recent microwave applications survey, short haul was is the top (90%) and PmP in the bottom (20%) of the list.

Some issues that still need to be clarified are: what is packet microwave for millimeter wave, for small cells and what are the differences and concerns. Small cells definition given, “low power cells (0.5 – 5W) within an urban clutter”, but is that enough? What are the installation economics and engineering of the site, where and how does ‘the man with the ladder’ fit in and the repeatable process of deploying 20 small cells along a street in a couple of hours or even in a few days as MLL, a UK network operator mentioned. On the other hand it’s difficult to forecast IP traffic due to its large fluctuation, thus robust bandwidth provisioning is needed.

Automated solutions seemed to start shaping a new landscape, as ‘zero touch’ provisioning for scalable rollout, mobility management, SON and overall future intelligent backhaul level developments of stand-alone systems.  Advanced LTE could even change and improve any phase synchronization issues. Looking more into the future, even a 3^rd generation millimeter wave platform could address all the current TCO issues, satisfying all the technical requirements of small cells.

ExelixisNet.com, an independent analyst’s firm, covered the media part of the event, joining interesting discussions with vendors, operators and other analysts, identifying the need for ‘toolkit’ case studies for different cities that could be done either internally and more intensively like the one that EE is working on or externally with a three-part collaboration, operator, vendor and analyst.

PMP may solve the small cells challenge in the near future

Mobile operators around the world are watching the exponential growth of mobile data usage that demands solutions and a corresponding need for mobile backhaul infrastructure. Usually, the time consuming installation of fiber and its higher cost within urban environments, render traditional fiber backhaul impractical in many cases. Therefore, microwave presents a compelling cost-effective alternative. This is noticeably evident in the developed mobile broadband markets of EMEA and APAC, where carrier competition and increasing bandwidth use are strategic drivers.

Despite the dominant role of traditional point-to-point microwave (PTP) today due to the advantages of performance and capacity, there are many other viable solutions available to support the small cells and access network. For example, millimeter wave equipment could also a good alternative in the near future by solving the backhaul challenge. All outdoor point-to-multipoint (PMP) radios with carrier-grade capabilities are also expected to become a key asset for backhaul links between lamp posts and the sides of buildings where small cells will be installed. In principle, the carrier grade links will allow small cells connectivity via only one-hop in the backhaul and also re-use existing infrastructure, for example connect directly to the point of presence (PoP). Regarding savings, PMP links promise significant OpEx and CapEx reduction over PTP when deployed in medium to short distances, below 2.5km. However, the business case for small cells has yet to be fully demonstrated.

At the end of 2011, Maravedis Research sized the wireless point-to-multipoint (PMP) backhaul equipment revenues market at more than $1 billion by 2016, up from an estimated $200 million in 2011. Maravedis believes the overall PMP wireless backhaul market growth will kick-start in late 2013, driven by the increasing number of commercial LTE deployments combined with the small cell market escalation.

Today, there is a high level of PMP testing activity from operators with several projects running worldwide, anticipating the PMP solution's appeal and the small cells fit. Operators' focus on backhaul is driven by their need to identify new solutions that add more capacity. There were several discussions held on this topic during the recent backhaul event in Berlin at the 14^th Transport Networks for Mobile Operators (TNMO), an EMEA's leading specialist forum for mobile backhaul, RAN and core transport networking professionals.

Orange France (operator) and Intracom Telecom (vendor) intensively discussed the topic along with Bluwan and Siklu during the TNMO event. The operator admitted that PMP gains momentum, with improvements to the technology, cost reductions, evolution of RAN equipment to Ethernet interfaces, and small cell deployment. One of the difficulties that vendors and operators needed to overcome is to prove the PMP small cell business case which should be examined case by case. As Intracom Telecom believes, "there is no technology champion" for small cell backhauling and technology, synergies should be exploited to address effectively operator needs. France Telecom, that has a special focus on microwave (group networks are around 80 percent microwave based), grabbed the opportunity to discuss the pros and cons of PMP technology. There was a special weight on the pros; the spectrum license fees can make very significant savings, depending on the country, but also traffic type can affect aggregation efficiency (E1, Ethernet, Wi-Fi backhaul, etc). Furthermore, they highlighted ease to add new sites and the potential savings from reduced maintenance costs (less equipment and lower power consumption). In the cons, a potential item identified was that costs can vary significantly depending on the deployment scenario, green field or swap out. Overall, the operator was keen on the PMP technology, describing deployment and hardware challenges. Among the challenges which operators are facing is that All Outdoor/Zero footprint equipment is not always "Plug and Play." That includes cases with only optical traffic connections and separate power cables supported with non-standard PoE or no lightning protection if directly connected.

A very attractive PMP solution that was a good fit for operator's specs, was that presented by Intracom Telecom, the only vendor supporting both PTP at MW and millimeter bands as wells as PMP integrated transmission platforms. Specifically, the vendor proposed PMP backhaul for small cells following medium to short range (up to 2.5km) and Gigabit sector capacity (4Gb Base station), suggesting scalable and easy installation and dynamic bandwidth allocation per small cell. One of the best rated PMP solutions depending on spectrum availability and Line of Sight (LOS) presence was proposed for the 26/28 GHz frequency bands usually available in most countries. Among the main advantages is the backhaul optimization achievement but also a low-cost solution over the PTP, especially the technology synergies between PMP and E-Band that can achieve a complete mobile backhaul solution. Bluwan discussed a different solution in the 42 GHz presenting the PMP millimeter wave aspect aiming to add high capacity in the Gbps range. Intracom Telecom and Siklu agreed that the 60 GHz (unlicensed) solution is also one of the best rated for small cells with a very small form factor, low cost and higher capacities but also LOS with precise alignment.

In 2012, PMP vendors will continue improving products, testing and demos to prove the essence for more PMP links. More investment is expected to flow in order to accomplish that, but also new movers and shakers might arise driving strategic acquisitions. Competition will lead to higher microwave radio capacity, smaller footprints and efficient management capabilities that will become increasingly important in proving and winning large contracts with mobile operators--mainly in Africa, the Middle East and Latin America and even new markets such as Australia. Although PMP is not the dominant backhaul technology of today, it is expected to rise, playing an important role in the network in 2012 and beyond, supporting the evolution of small cells.

Source: Maravedis: PMP may solve the small cells challenge in the near future - FierceBroadbandWireless http://www.fiercebroadbandwireless.com/story/maravedis-pmp-may-solve-small-cells-challenge-near-future/2012-06-01#ixzz1wdbyH8eC