Alcatel-Lucent has pressed the "refresh" button on its set of solutions around mobile backhaul. Most of its moves are aimed at bringing greater options to small cell backhaul options, as evidenced in last month's partnership announcement with small cell millimetre wave provider Sub10 Systems.
That was one reseller agreement, but this time around Al-Lu has announced a more wide ranging spruce up of its backhaul portfolio. It says it is being driven by the requirement from operators to support small cell deployments "in a diverse range of public locations such as lampposts, bus stops, public buildings and stadiums".
"To provide access to the network and transport back to the core for all of these new sites, operators will need to employ an equally diverse range of mobile backhaul methods – optical fiber, copper, microwave, Ethernet – which can make their backhaul networks very complex to manage," a press release from the company said..
Additions or enhancements to the backhaul toolset at Al-Lu's disposal include:
- New variants of Alcatel-Lucent’s 7705 Service Aggregation Router (SAR) including an end-to-end service layer for more efficient OAM, advanced timing/synchronisation, flexible powering options, and Auto-Discovery and Provisioning (ADP) capabilities
- An expanded range of microwave transport solutions, including 60 Ghz point-to-point line-of-sight (as referenced above), and sub 6 Ghz for point-to-point and point-to-multipoint non-line-of-sight applications.
- Increased capacity on the company’s 9500 Microwave Packet Radio
- Optimisation of the company’s existing broadband access portfolio Al-Lu said that new copper- and fiber-based small cell backhaul access solutions enable mobile operators to make better use of their existing broadband network to backhaul metro cell networks.
- A broader range of professional services to help design, optimise and deploy backhaul networks to support metro cell deployments, building on and extending the recently announced Alcatel-Lucent lightRadio™ Metrocell Express ‘build-operate-transfer’ solution for turnkey deployments.
Philippe Keryer, President of Alcatel-Lucent’s Networks Group, said: “The combination of our strengths in IP, optics, microwave, fixed access and wireless puts us in a relatively unique position amongst the other vendors in the market, and places us in an ideal position to address the mobile backhaul challenge with the introduction of small cell deployments. Not only do we offer the most comprehensive set of backhaul options in the industry, we also bring unmatched solution integration experience to the table. We are confident that our leadership in mobile backhaul will only increase in the metro cell era.”