More on Backhaul
December 1, 2008
Thank goodness it’s Monday… as we all come out of our food-induced comas of last week’s feasts. Here’s a question to volley to start the week off right:
Dave,
What sort of backhaul deals do you see nowadays. Market-wide, or one tower at a time, or mostly in between?   Are they supplementing your fiber to some towers with copper from other providers to other towers where it is not justified, or are they using wireless backhaul to the towers you bring on-net?
We have seen and built market wide fiber-based solutions to cell towers. RFI/RFPs indicate this trend will continue as well. Typically, the densest of towers are addressed while leaving the less dense towers to ILEC legacy T1 copper facilities. We have yet to experience piecemeal one at a time tower requests. Starting bandwidth serving towers we have built to have ranged between 100 Meg and 300 Meg … sure says T1 is dead.
No, we do not supplement our tower builds utilizing legacy copper or bonding legacy copper. Why? We have been there and done that for land based opportunities, and we have found the copper facilities to be extremely unreliable, assuming the ILEC even has extra copper pairs to begin with. In addition, starting bandwidth levels of 100 Meg renders copper inefficient and so passé.
We are seeing a few “wireless backhaul” businesses out there trying to compete with fiber. Of those companies that are public, a quick check of their financial information indicates a stressed business model. Customers need to factor risk of bankruptcy in conducting business with these companies and of course the service reliability factors.
As I have said before and will state it again: you get what you pay for in this age of digital convergence. No such thing as a low priced, high quality lunch.
Have a comment for the Straight Shooter? Leave your thoughts below or email Dave now.
Written by Dave Rusin - Telecom Executive
Posted by admin | Filed Under American telecom, Fiber bandwidth, Telecom broadband, Telecommunications industry, Trends + telecommunications, Trends in telecommunications
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Very Interesting post. There is very little public data about wireless backhaul trends from the people who would know.
Agreed that the public microwave backhaul companies are going-concern challenged, but what about the carriers themselves purchasing and using the microwave equipment themselves?
Another question - is the backhaul service you are installing SONET/SDH, Ethernet, or a hybrid- using either EoS or circuit emulation for T1’s over Ethernet?