X-Series. Addressing the challenges of 5G backhaul Today. Wireless backhaul is to enter a new era.

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1 ! X-Series Addressing the challenges of 5G backhaul Today. Wireless backhaul is to enter a new era. As we move towards 5G, demand is ever increasing due to: - the number of connected devices: both the number of connected subscribers is still on the rise as well as the the number of devices by subscribers. - the nature of devices: not only traditional handsets, tablets of PCs are now connecting to the network, but Internet of Things is soon at our doorsteps. - the ever growing demand for traffic, with video flooding networks with terabytes of data each day. Gradual evolution, as seen, through the past decade will not be sufficient to provide the extension of capacity that is required to address the demand for 5G speed. Let s first have a look at the latest developments in microwave technologies and assess their potential to help address the challenges of 5G backhaul capacity increase. JP Fournier - January Page 1 of 7

2 Increasing modulation order reaches its limits: Customers deploying 2048QAM and 4096QAM modulation today are already facing the limits of ever growing signal to noise ration requirements to operate a steady level of modulation. And while 4096QAM suggests a 2x factor increase compared to 2048QAM, unfortunately, this 2x factor only applies to modem complexity and cost price of the required advanced RF components and ADC converters cost. In reality, the increase in spectrum efficiency is always smaller as we move from one modulation step to the other. While going 256QAM to 1024QAM provides a 25% increase in radio capacity, 4096QAM provides only 20% capacity increase in spite a large penalty in component costs and signal to noise requirements. MiMo barely applicable in the field: Although MiMo brings a significant improvement in radio capacity, it faces installation challenges while being applied to microwave frequencies. Line of Sight constraints often force antennas to reach minimum heights in towers and masts, and the vertical separation required to benefit from MiMo can rarely be implemented due to towers height and / or wind-load limitations. Header Compression, from myth to reality: Header compression has always been the most overrated technology in terms of capacity increase. Its benefits varies so much with the nature of traffic. Compression shows huge improvement factor for some specific bit stream for uses cases, unfortunately totally unrealistic in real network traffic. But the average throughput improvement reaches barely 5-8% over random Ethernet traffic. Of course, despite the incremental throughput increase brought by higher modulation order or header compression, it is a must-do for today s backhaul products and we are implementing these techniques as we strive to provide state-of-the-art microwave throughput. However we have been re-thinking microwave transmission products to bridge the gap between today s radio capacity and the anticipated capacity newer network usages are requiring. The X-Series product platform that we are bringing to the market in 2017 is the result of an intense R&D work at Spectronite to reach new heights in network throughput, and entering the 1Gbps - 10Gbps link throughput domain. JP Fournier - January Page 2 of 7

3 Blurring the lines between long-haul and last-mile. X-Series is redefining the way microwave technology is defined. It provides a single platform addressing both the long distance, aggregated backbone connections traditionally known as longhaul and the requirement for multi-gigabit capacity at higher frequency required in urban, last-mile deployments. Gigabit and beyond X-Series is a truly evolutive product platform. Starting at 560 Mbps of radio capacity, it is addressing the demand for ever growing capacity through a unique and patented product architecture. Growing in multiples of its base capacity, connections speed increase from Gbps, through 4.5 Gbps up to a full 10 Gbps link capacity, with capacity increase through header compression providing another 10% throughput increase to these numbers. Virtually unlimited capacity The unique product architecture of X-Series has been engineered with a step-by-step evolutive deployment approach in mind. Starting with Gigabit connections today keeps the way open for a 2x, 4x, 8x capacity increase when demand is here. Designed for 0-downtime This is really a domain where X-Series is at its best. Giving the capabilities to upgrade capacity with no traffic interruption. No more heavy works with planned maintenance and their associated downtime. X-Series allows for uninterrupted service. No more link shutdown, OMT or 4+0 coupler installation and the associated service impact. Just like capacity upgrade, maintenance can also be performed during product life time with no impact on service continuity. Low-loss architecture When planning for N+0 or protected N+N links, last-mile microwave products are really suffering from very high loss induced by the necessary couplers. Coupler technology is vastly outdated. And today so-called mediation devices are just going the same way. At the opposite, X-Series proposes a brand new approach to combining radios for increased capacity or the link protection. Indeed, the advent of multi-gigabit connections in Service Providers network makes redundancy necessary as the impact of loosing such a connection would be increasingly dramatic to a growing number of users. X-Series is unbeaten when it comes to serving every single db from the radio Tx amplifiers to its attached antenna. The unique low-loss, no-coupler structure of the radio makes RF planning an effortless task when working with advanced configurations. JP Fournier - January Page 3 of 7

4 Wireless Backhaul re-designed. No Bill-of-Material Overweight Embarking on a journey to network capacity upgrade requires careful planning and spending of the necessary CAPEX resources. Moving through 3G / 4G and 5G, the frequency of network capacity upgrades have been increasing strongly in the past decade. A very cash-impacting side effect is the necessity to shorten the life cycle of microwave radios while these units are designed to last for decades. Current microwave radios provide only a partial and unsatisfactory answer to that problem: - early obsolescence: deploying 1+0 only radios with no possibility to evolve into 2+0 radios tomorrow will make the product obsolete after only a few years, increasing the need for more advanced XPIC-capable products to fully utilize both polarizations of the selected frequency band. - brutal overweight: deploying an XPIC radio today, with the perspective to start in 1+0 configuration and later activate XPIC has a strong impact on Bill-of-Material on the vendor side that inevitably reflects into an unnecessary CAPEX spending. X-Series embarks just the necessary hardware. The atomic product structure allows for the deployment of just the hardware required to meet today s needs. When capacity increase becomes stringent, X-Series can be completed incrementally to achieve the newly desired capacity goal. This evolving capacity approach makes X-Series the best available option to keep hardware spendings and capacity upgrades in phase. Flexible channel management Addressing the 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps capacity domain, X-Series provides an optimal frequency channels utilization. Supported channel bandwidth start with 28MHz up to an unprecedented 560 MHz. Although exciting, this requires agility with regards to the usage of existing available channels. X- Series provides then the unique ability to address non-adjacent channels or even to spread its utilization over multiple neighbor bands such as 13 GHz, 15 and 18 GHz, or the higher 26, 32, 38 GHz bands combo. Spectrum Re-generation Network capacity increase cannot go without higher and more optimized utilization of existing spectrum resources. X-Series supports the ability to increase frequency re-use factor on large nodal, aggregation sites. Thus, really re-generating existing spectrum, whose usage has been long kept impossible by traditional microwave products. JP Fournier - January Page 4 of 7

5 Smart Protection Scheme Going for a network capacity increase, network planners have to review the associated risk assessment metrics. The impact of loosing a 100 Mbps connection has indeed nothing to compare with the loss of a 2 or 5 Gbps connection. Unfortunately, protection of current products comes at a hight cost on may factor: - It introduces a large penalty on transmission link budgets with the addition of db-hungry hybrid couplers. - this translates into a penalty on CAPEX with the need for duplicated standby radios and the cost increase resulting of larger antennas (compensating for induced couplers loss) and the couplers themselves. Again X-Series provides an elegant response for risk-management. The very structure of the X- Series product provides built-in radio protection. Protection is indeed provided through aggregation for larger capacity stacks. For lower capacity, N+N redundancy is made obsolete through a much more cost-optimized N+1 redundancy support. Back to Layer1 Aggregation It is always striking to see vendors abandon great techniques they have evangelized for years, for the sake of selling less optimized products that suits better their short-term product plans. Just as the advent of MP3 in digital music implied an audible loss in music quality over more advanced compression techniques or higher-end analog audio, Layer2 aggregation (or LACP when sticking to the associated control-plane) has introduced severe artifacts on traffic throughput. Layer1 traffic aggregation is indeed a much clever load-balancing techniques when it comes to providing N+0 link aggregation: - aggregating traffic at Layer1 level provides bit-exact traffic re-ordering. While Layer2 aggregation is by nature suffering of the reduced granularity of re-assembling traffic streams at the Ethernet level. Granularity suffers with frame size ranging from 84Bytes to 10000Byes jumbo frames - several Layer1 aggregated links are then perceived as one single physical link from the Ethernet perspective. - With Adaptive Modulation especially active at 2048QAM and 4096QAM, Layer1 aggregation provides graceful degradation whenever capacity of individual links vary unevenly due to local changing transmission conditions. X-Series provides pure Layer1 traffic management. Thus maximizing radio throughput at all time and supporting real-time full load balancing. JP Fournier - January Page 5 of 7

6 Right Interfaces for the right traffic Back to the basics. A 1 Gbps interface has limited throughput due to the very structure of Ethernet frames. Its throughput will never reach anything above 950 Mbps. While 2048QAM with XPIC enable virtually two channels at 510 Mbps radio capacity each, it is obvious that such a radio equipped with a single 1 Gbps port will underutilized its radio capacity X-Series will serve every single bit of traffic flowing through its radio interfaces. Connectivity is suited to meet demanding 10 Gbps connectivity, thus delivering the best throughput to serve to best customers experience. JP Fournier - January Page 6 of 7

7 X-Series: entering the new era of 5G backhaul. As a conclusion, X-Series is a tremendous evolution in today s wireless backhaul landscape. Re-thinking the entire product definition process, Spectronite engineering team has come up with this unique product platform that is taking wireless backhaul to new heights. X-Series is the forward looking alternative to tomorrow s increasing usage and their associated capacity demand. Enter the new era of 5G backhaul, now. About Spectronite Spectronite strives to bring innovation to the wireless backhaul landscape. We design our products to provide Mobile Operators, ISPs and Private Network Operators with the most efficient way to interconnect their customers and deliver capacity. Focusing on the most essential performance indicators of a wireless backhaul network, that is maximum capacity and superior uptime, Spectrnonite has brought LinkProtect to the market in With the launch of X-Series platform in 2017, Spectronite is becoming the un-missable provider of advanced wireless backhaul solution paving the way to 5G deployments. JP Fournier - January Page 7 of 7