Cyan mobile backhaul platform targets wholesale market needs

A new wireless backhaul offering from Cyan, announced today, has several capabilities aimed at enhancing network operators’ ability to serve the expanding needs of wholesale customers.

“We see DWDM expanding further to the [network] edge,” said Frank Wiener, vice president of marketing and international sales for Cyan, in an interview.

The need for DWDM is driven, in part, by expanding bandwidth needs. Typically, carriers offering wholesale backhaul connectivity are providing services of between 50 and 100 Mb/s per tower per operator today, but that is expected to increase to 300 Mb/s per operator using the current 4G spectrum allocation, Wiener said. With several operators per tower, bandwidth requirements can be substantial.

Another important trend in mobile backhaul is a move toward connecting five to 20 cell towers in a ring configuration to support route diversity, which means traffic on an individual ring could be in the “tens of gigabits in the not-too-distant future,” said Wiener. Carriers are also looking at the possibility of using the same platform to support business Ethernet service offerings, he added.

Cyan’s new offering, which the company calls “TowerAware” wireless backhaul, is essentially an environmentally hardened version of the company’s Z-series packet optical transport platform, making that platform suitable for deployment closer to the network edge.

The TowerAware platform
The TowerAware platform is available as a chassis that can go into a third-party cabinet or with its own cabinet. The product also supports multi-layer management capabilities, which Cyan refers to as its “service level aware network framework.”

Those management capabilities will enable service providers that offer mobile backhaul on a wholesale basis to offer service level agreements to carrier customers—a capability that is increasingly in demand, Wiener said.

Those wholesale customers also can use Cyan’s cloud-based CyPortal to view OAM and performance data for their connections through a web interface, Wiener said. That’s a requirement that more and more service providers are including in mobile backhaul requests for proposal, he said.

CyPortal also can be used to provide SLA performance reporting for approved third-party devices supporting the ITU Y.1731 Ethernet OAM standard, such as network interface devices from Accedian Networks and Overture Networks, Cyan said.

Planning tool to come
Beginning in July, Cyan plans to offer an enhanced planning tool for the TowerAware platform that will help in addressing another requirement that is turning up in more and more mobile backhaul RFPs, Wiener said.

“Companies like Verizon are looking for sub-five-millisecond latency from the tower to the mobile switching center,” said Wiener.

Noting that transiting an Ethernet switch can introduce tens of milliseconds of delay into a connection, Wiener said the new planning tool will be able to gauge the latency impact of various network nodes, enabling the wholesale provider to accurately predict end-to-end latency and “put forward more competitive bids.”

The planning tool also works with Google maps, enabling service providers to see cell tower locations on a map.