DragonWave pledges spectral efficiency to breach European fortress

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DragonWave pledges spectral efficiency to breach European fortress

By CAROLINE GABRIEL

Published: 8 February, 2010

READ MORE: Europe | DragonWave | Backhaul

Canadian wireless backhaul vendor DragonWave has been enjoying storming stock performance recently, gaining 900% in the past year. This has been partly because of its high profile contract to support Clearwire's WiMAX networks across the US, and also on talks with Verizon and AT&T. However, the firm would be the first to agree that it must not be over-dependent on one country, so it is stepping up its attack on a tougher proposition, Europe's upcoming LTE roll-outs.

The vendor has launched its Horizon Quantum product, already announced in north America last fall, in Europe. This system's key promise rests in spectral efficiency, with DragonWave claiming to support up to 2.5 times more capacity per channel than rival offerings, allowing carriers to make the most of sometimes limited tranches of backhaul spectrum.

Although European cellcos have been more amenable to microwave backhaul than their US counterparts, with operators like Vodafone shifting a large part of their capacity to wireless, this means the market is more tightly controlled by incumbent suppliers like Ericsson than north America. Efficient use of rapidly diminishing and costly spectrum resources may be a key way to attract the 3G carriers' attention to a smaller player. As DragonWave points out, spectrum licenses represent one of the largest recurring costs in backhaul networks for many European providers, and backhaul capacity requirements are mushrooming under the weight of 3G, and soon 4G, data traffic.

The Horizon Quantum leverages various technologies to boost efficiency and raw capacity - including higher order modulation, packet-based architectures with statistical multiplexing, XPIC and bandwidth optimization techniques. All this results in performance of 4Gbps per link using two 56MHz channels with latency of less than 0.1 milliseconds, while offering pseudowire capability for supporting Ethernet and legacy TDM traffic on one packet-based system.

With integrated switching capability, Horizon Quantum can also perform aggregation and serve as a switch for ring and mesh network architectures. It works in licensed and unlicensed frequencies between 6GHz and 38GHz.