In Berkeley, Calif., Tarana Wireless is demonstrating a solution that it hopes will become a new standard for wireless backhaul for small cells. Tarana is a small Silicon Valley company with some impressive wireless industry figures as advisors and board members, including Arun Sarin, former CEO of Vodafone and Harald Braun, who has led both Aviat and Siemens Networks. The company was founded by technical experts from the University of California, Berkeley, and has grown to nearly 40 employees as it takes its technology, which the company calls “the first universal small cell backhaul solution,” to market trials this quarter, with commercial shipments to begin next year.
Backhaul is one of many issues that operators are trying to figure out as they move toward LTE-Advanced, with its vision of heterogeneous networks and small cell underlays to provide better capacity in congested facilities and urban areas. Because small cells are supposed to involve large deployments at a relatively low cost per cell, the issue of cost-effective backhaul has been a big one – it isn’t practical or cost-effective to run fiber to every small cell on a lamppost or the side of a building.
Tarana is demonstrating its AbsoluteAir product at Mobile World Congress this week. The company uses connecting nodes and end nodes in what they call the “Tarana Topology,” which backhauls four small cell sites to one central node designed to be co-located on a macro site.
Steve Sifferman, president and CEO of Tarana Wireless, said that the company believes from conversations with carriers, that other vendors are “fundamentally taking a cookie cutter approach … that falls short in a variety of ways – throughput, range and cost of ownership.” He says that Tarana avoids this with the ability to provide line of sight and non-line of sight wireless backhaul with antennas that automatically self-align, and nodes that have a NLoS range of up to four kilometers and “nearly unlimited” range for line of sight, operating in the 2.5-3.7 GHz bands, with significantly higher speeds than current solutions. The range allows more coverage with less equipment, Tarana says, lowering the total cost of ownership.
“Scaling small cell backhaul in terms of performance and density has been a significant hurdle for vendors but is an essential market need,” said Nick Marshall, ABI Research principal analyst, adding that Tarana’s technology has created “a new wireless paradigm.”
“There’s been wild speculation on the small cell opportunity – some that lump together small cells with residential femtocells, Wi-Fi hotspots, and in-building and outdoor,” said Michael Howard, Infonetics Research’s co-founder and principal analyst for carrier networks. Infonetics recently reported on the outdoor small cell backhaul equipment market, as distinct from other technologies. The company expects a cumulative $5 billion to be spent worldwide on outdoor small cell backhaul equipment between 2012 and 2016, and that the market will kick into high gear in 2014 – when Tarana plans to be commercially shipping its products. Howard added that another nearly $44 billion will be spent on macrocell backhaul equipment during that five-year period.
Report co-author Richard Webb, who is directing analyst for microwave, mobile offload and mobile broadband devices at Infonetics, added, “We expect to see significant shifts in the type of equipment vendors use to backhaul outdoor small cells, with millimeter wave and non-line-of-sight, or NLOS, equipment becoming the top segments of the market by 2016. Millimeter wave equipment has a high capacity (1 [gigabit per second in a single channel) and very low latency, and nearly all of the operators we’ve interviewed are evaluating millimeter wave for small cell backhaul.”
However, Infonetics did note that “there is no silver bullet backhaul solution for all small cell deployment scenarios, as each depends on multiple variables, including location, form factor limitations, local regulations, available power and network, and cost. As a result, mobile operators and backhaul transport providers need a diverse tool kit of solutions for small cell backhaul.” Still, the company said that it expects all the outdoor small cell backhaul technologies that it tracks to have compound annual growth rates of high double- to triple-digit percents through at least 2016 – and Tarana plans to get in on that growth opportunity.
