As service providers in rural America begin to apply stimulus dollars to their 4G rollouts, DragonWave is supplying high-capacity packet microwave backhaul to facilitate the interconnection. Last week at CTIA it landed KeyOn Communications and Northeast Wireless Networks.
KeyOn Communications Holdings Inc. is bringing services to rural communities across Nevada and will be using DragonWave’s Horizon Compact and Horizon Duo high-capacity packet microwave to anchor the "middle mile" network components for KeyOn's 4G wireless network service rollout.
KeyOn serves residential, businesses and critical community facilities such as health care providers. It is a provider of wireless broadband, satellite video and voice-over-Internet-protocol (VoIP) services and September 2010 received a $10.2 million American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) award to provide 4G, last-mile wireless broadband access and VoIP services in qualified rural communities throughout Nevada.
DragonWave Horizon Compact and Horizon Duo will form roughly 110 high-capacity links in a major ring architecture interconnecting communities across Nevada. KeyOn's resilient architecture and high-capacity statewide network will allow for cost-effective aggregation of Internet bandwidth at only a few select fiber points.
Alan Solheim, vice president of product management at DragonWave, said backhaul costs range from 25 percent to 60 percent of operational expenses, depending on the provider. He also said those costs will rise significantly in 4G networks and cited a Yankee Group report that forecasted back haul costs rising from $2,100 per ell cite in 2009 to $23,000 by 2012.
Part of that cost is supporting hybrid networks. “Most hybrid solutions in the market today carry TDM as TDM and IP as IP, which is fine because it is low-risk transport. But you don’t get any of the network unification benefits and you still end up managing two networks," Solheim said.
Jonathan Snyder, CEO at KeyOn, said DragonWave offers a comprehensive, flexible family of solutions that enables the company to deploy the optimal solution for every link allowing it to both remotely dial up and dynamically adjust capacity levels as necessary.
KeyOn hopes to introduce services community by community across Nevada beginning early in the second half of 2011. When the network is complete, nearly 100,000 people, 5,500 businesses and 850 critical community facilities across the state will be able to access next-generation, 4G broadband services.
Northeast Wireless has a greenfield opportunity in rural Maine and Oregon and will use DragonWave's Horizon Compact and Horizon Quantum to enable 3G and 4G services in those underserved markets.
Robert Parsloe, CEO of Northeast Wireless said inadequate backhaul connections linking rural cell towers won’t support today's advanced, broadband applications and that the DragonWave solution effectively creates '"fiber in the sky" that provides the most innovative, cost-efficient and secure broadband wireless services without incurring prohibitive operational and capital expenditures.
Northeast Wireless Networks is a Maine-based, rural-focused, shared-network carrier that provides wholesale wireless broadband services to major telecommunications carriers in markets throughout the United States that have been historically underserved. It selected the DragonWave Horizon solution for its pure-packet performance, unsurpassed scalability, proven reliability in challenging deployment environments and long-term investment protection.
DragonWave Horizon products operate in both licensed and unlicensed radio frequencies between 6 GHz and 60 GHz and deliver pure packet microwave performance with software-scalable, ultra-low latency transport of up to 4 Gbps per link.
“Both [deployments] are rural applications, but very different in focus. One is for wholesale carriers the other is more municipalities and vertical-market focused, but both are building large area aggregation rings with spurs using both the Compact and Quantum products," Solheim said.
