Backhaul to the Future

Cellular service is booming; subscriber numbers grew nearly 10 percent from 2002 to 2003, according to trade group Cellular Telecommunications & Internet Association. Mobile operators are working to keep up with the escalating demands on their networks from a capacity, density and geographic standpoint;

CTIA reports the number of cell sites grew 17 percent from 2002 to 2003. As they expand, mobile operators are being targeted by wireline carrier's carriers offering next-generation answers to growing backhaul requirements.

"We have said for the past two years that these wireless providers' requirements for backhaul [are] going to explode. We are seeing that take place right now," says Todd Vecchio, co-founder and executive vice president of sales for Global Internetworking Inc., a facilities-neutral carrier. "Everybody's consumption of bandwidth is going to triple or quadruple at least over the next year or two just from the individual cell user. I think there is a major bandwidth requirement moving forward for the wireless providers."

Indeed, wireless minutes of use were up about 30 percent in 2003 compared with previous year, CTIA reports.

Global Internetworking is addressing the infrastructure buildout frenzy with a service called Wireless Rapid Response it unveiled in March at the CTIA Wireless 2004 exhibition in Atlanta. The service offers wireless carriers access to its pop2pop.com database of about 1,450 facilities-based carriers as well as its project managers to design and provision backhaul solutions.

While wireless providers are in a race to roll out upgraded infrastructure, Wireless Rapid Response offers them a quicker way to meet their backhaul needs, says Andrew Goldsmith, vice president of marketing and sales for Global Internetworking. He says the offer addresses several challenges to speedy deployment, such as knowledge of available providers, available capacity and experienced provisioning teams.

Without someone focused on the task, mobile operators "can spend a lot of time spinning their wheels or buying at disadvantageous rates or timetables," he says.

Goldsmith says fulfilling the backhaul requirement from the cell tower to the backbone often is one line item on an engineering team's to-do list and typically is not a centralized function handled at the corporate level.

Wireless Rapid Response enables wireless companies to get price quotes in real time and work with a project manager to set up the best circuit for their primary or diverse route needs. "When you are working in these very rural areas, it can take weeks, if not months, to get feedback from the facilities-based carriers to see if they even have capacity. We can do that in a matter of seconds," says Vecchio.

He adds that pop2pop.com also helps lower costs. "We mitigate mileage costs by identifying the most efficient route. In turn, by doing that, we are identifying more quickly where capacity does and does not exist." This is important as new backhaul builds can delay deployment by months.

Goldsmith says the handholding extends to order scrubbing, provisioning and network management.

Taking a different approach, carrier's carrier Progress Telecom is exploiting railroad and utility rights of way of its two parent companies to put together a bundled offer that combines cell tower leases with wired and wireless Ethernet backhaul. The company already manages about 300 cell towers along its network, which extends into areas that are less traveled.

"We have one of the most dense footprints on the East Coast, but this is a unique offering really helping to bring cell tower services back to our backbone and keeping it in the native Ethernet the whole way," says Greg Tennant, vice president of customer service delivery for Progress Telecom.

The advantages of Ethernet are many, he says, including the ability to scale in 1mbps increments unlike traditional circuits that jump from DS1 to DS3. "Once you have the physical connection, you can add new virtual circuits or add additional capacity, and it's more of a logical keystroke on a computer instead of rolling a truck to upgrade the circuit," Tennant says. In addition, he says it's more compatible with IP-oriented services.

While every implementation is custom, Tennant says Progress Telecom will be looking to use fixed wireless where possible because it's less expensive and is diverse from the embedded network. He adds that the carrier will lease licensed spectrum in order to live up to SLAs. "[Free spectrum such as 2.4GHz] may work good for a while until you get X number of people on it and then your service starts degrading," he says. "You can't really guarantee the level of the transport."

Progress Telecom is developing a pilot test with one mobile operator that will likely run through the remainder of the year as a proof of concept, but Tennant says the carrier is seeking new opportunities simultaneously.

Callipso Corp. also is set to do a beta trial with a large mobile carrier at the end of May. "Essentially, we can take traffic back from their MSCs (mobile switching centers) and we aggregate it into our [private IP] network and route it for them. Our initial trial will be across four MSCs," says Callipso's Chief Marketing Officer Randy Mueller. The company is looking at substituting traditional point-to-point mesh architecture with a router-based IP VPN architecture. This network design is expected to be about three times less expensive, Mueller says.

"As a number of these carriers move from voice cellular traffic into data and Wi-Fi traffic, I think the ability to aggregate that traffic over a single IP pipe throughout that network and terminate it either in their networks or throughout the PSTN is a real benefit that we bring them that they really can't find anywhere else," he says. Another benefit to the mobile operators is "there is no capital outlay, so they can scale their network by using our network."

Global Crossing Ltd. also is tendering IP VPN proposals to wireless carriers, says Mike Leary, director of wireless marketing for the carrier. "It can function as a substitute for backhaul or a transport medium for applications that aren't efficient in the backhaul where they are trying to connect many nodes together," he says and explains the economic benefit is inverse to the number of nodes. "The more you have, the more cost-effective IP VPN becomes."

In addition to lower costs, IP VPNs allow for various quality-of-service levels - high for traffic such as video or voice and low for non-real-time messaging.