OCTOBER 20, 2009 By Stephen Hardy -- After announcing the offering in September for the European market, Transmode will introduce its Multi-Service Mobile Backhaul Solution to the U.S. market this month at both Supercomm (Chicago, October 21-23) and SCTE Cable Tec Expo (Denver, October 28-30).
Transmode also will unveil its 10G Multi-Service Muxponder, an enabling piece of the Multi-Service Mobile Backhaul Solution.
In an interview in Europe with Lightwave a few weeks after the offering’s initial September 3 debut, Transmode CTO Sten Nordell said the mobile backhaul offering’s primary point of differentiation was its ability to support TDM and Ethernet streams simultaneously over the same wavelength. This ability enables carriers to accommodate both legacy TDM and emerging packet-based links in parallel, thus offering carriers an easy evolutionary path towards an eventual all-packet infrastructure.
As some base stations are shared among multiple carriers, this Intelligent WDM (iWDMTM) capability also means that several carriers could share the same fiber link. Each carrier’s traffic stream could be transported on the same wavelength with separate synchronization domains, Nordell said. This is because the unit only needs one wavelength and has up to four TDM (for 8, 16, or 24 E1/T1 ports) and up to four Ethernet synchronization domains (two or four Ethernet ports). If more capacity is needed, then WDM optics can be used instead of 1310- or 1550-nm optics; a second box would then be placed at the same site. But for the majority of cases only one unit per cell site would be needed for a very long time, in Nordell's view.
Carriers also could use the platform in hybrid network models in which mobile backhaul and, for example, DSLAM backhaul could be performed by the same network, Nordell added. Wholesale services also would provide a natural application, he said.
Transmode hopes to interest US MSOs, ILECs, CLECs and IOCs in Multi-Service Mobile Backhaul Solution. In comparing the U.S. and European opportunities for the product line, Nordell believes the wholesale market represents a bigger draw in the U.S. than in Europe, although bit rates that might drive optical links are higher in Europe, he believes. The convergence of fixed and mobile networks also is a greater point of discussion in Europe, he said.
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