For the past ten years there has been a war on to create new flexible wireless methods of backhaul for cellular networks, but this week at Mobile World Congress, Siklu and Sckipio have combined this with G.fast to create a flexible backhaul system over both wireless and copper.
The Siklu contribution is the same millimeter-wave wireless backhaul points which it has been aiming at small cells for the few years, offering systems from 60 to 80 GHz using line of sight technologies and offering up to 2 Gbps for distances as far as 2.5 miles.
Sckipio Technologies, is now a partner which can help distribute this bandwidth over copper. We have long suggested that G.fast would be used to take a signal a few hundred meters to backhaul a small cell, but most people had assumed that it was attached to the Telco network, through nearby fiber.
There are a cadre of cellular operators which have increasingly turned away from Telco relationships for backhaul, such as Vodafone, preferring instead to control their infrastructure from end to end with equipment that may cost more in terms of one off capex, but which will lead to a lower cost of ownership in the long term. In some countries in Europe, such as Netherlands and Spain, Vodafone is installing fiber rapidly, and it would distribute this backbone network using Siklu wireless and then G.fast copper, with no telco Opex costs touching the network.
But this pair go further, suggesting that not only can this system power a small cell network, it can offer broadband to the home over existing copper, bypassing Telco or cable networks entirely. They merely have to lay fiber, connect it to a Siklu wireless, to feed a G.fast distribution point which offers anything up to 1 Gbps to the home over existing wires.
The two say that the combination is perfect for affordable ultra-broadband to consumers living in dense, city environments, particularly residents in apartment buildings and other multi-dwelling units (MDUs). Clearly this integration would only have been done if an operator had commissioned it, so we will keep on the lookout for such a contract – our money is on one of the Korean telcos, unless this is in the US. We know that a very similar application to this has been used at Korea Telecom, using G.now chips, derivatives from the Marvell G.hn chipsets.
In fact we were tempted to say that if those chips could deliver 500 Mbps, with G.fast still years away, there might be no uptake of G.fast. But given that the press release suggests that around 30% of US residents live in MDUs, it could be targeted there. Our belief is that this number is a bit high and we remind you of the numbers we cited back when the KT installation was first mooted. “There are some 35% of global homes in MDUs, around 25% in the US, and concentrations as high as 50% in parts of Eastern Europe and parts of Asia Pacific, including Chinese suburbs and South Korea.” Which perhaps does not immediately suggest the US.
However Itzik Ben-Bassat, CEO of Siklu said, “In cities such as San Francisco and New York, it is very challenging to trench fiber to the building and it’s impractical to install fiber all the way to each residence. By combining these two emerging technologies together, we can solve many of the major logistical, regulatory, and installation problems that make it expensive to deliver gigabit broadband to city-dwellers.”
The architecture consists of an E-Band antenna at the telephone central office connected wirelessly to an E-Band antenna on the top of a residential or office building. Then, via GPON, GigE or other wired connectivity, traffic is delivered to a G.fast distribution point in the wiring closet in the building that connects to 16 individual copper pairs that flow to customer residences. Inside the apartment, condo, or office, a simple G.fast modem or residential gateway is used to receive the ultra-broadband traffic.
Broadcom has been sensitive to the market lead that Sckipio has in G.fast, and it is also a player in both backhaul and small cells, so we will be interested to see if Broadcom covers this move in its own product line shortly.