Business need

Wireless operators today spend more than $3 billion—approximately half of their operational costs—for leasing T1/E1 lines from Local Exchange Carriers to connect wireless base stations back to their Mobile Switching Centers. Don’t you think cable operators are entitled to a share of that revenue—particularly since you can provide comparable services plus Ethernet transport at a much lower cost?

Challenges

Cable operators are well positioned to compete for this revenue stream due to the proximity of HFC plant to wireless base station locations. However, offering a competitive service requires reliable transport of T1/E1 traffic over the metro area with extremely fast protection-switching using a more cost-effective design than traditional service providers.

Solution

You can implement wireless backhaul today utilizing a next-generation SONET/SDH in the access network with ring termination centralized at the headend. This minimizes cost by reducing the number of T1/E1 cross-connect points and ring nodes while providing integrated transport for 2G/2.5G and 3G services.

Ciena's offerings

Ciena offers a cost-effective SONET/SDH micro-MSPP for placement near the cell site with a hardened option to maximize deployment flexibility. It supports T1/E1, DS3, 10/100baseT and GbE client interfaces with OC-3/12/48 or STM-1/4/16 network ports. Several nodes can be connected in a ring or point-to-point architecture to an aggegration node, either at the closest d-hub or centralized at the headend or primary hub. In either case, the SONET/SDH line signals can be transparently multiplexed using G.709 digital wrapper technology onto a common wavelength with VOD and CMTS traffic back to a headend MSPP node. There, the MSPP will groom the DS1/E1 traffic to channelized OC-n/STM-n ports and Ethernet traffic from all the cell sites to FE/GbE ports for handoff to the appropriate wireless operator.

Benefits

• Replace incumbent providers and offer wholesale services with minimal infrastructure investments
• Obtain a return on investment in as little as 10-13 month
• Single cell-site access device for T1/E1 and Ethernet connectivity
• Investment protection and graceful migration from OC/STM-n to GbE metro transport for 2/2.5G through 3GR5 evolution and beyond
• Transparent add/drop multiplexing of OC/STM-n and GbE minimizes metro wavelength utilization
• SONET/SDH Wraparound enables reuse of already lit node fiber
• Capture new revenue streams by offering profitable services to wireless service providers