Verizon Wireless beefing up backhaul with carrier Ethernet

Perhaps most significantly, Verizon will be able to distribute its transport capacity more effectively and efficiently, O’Neill said. TDM networks aggregate their capacity as the sum of their individual links. Building a 4G backhaul network using TDM would quickly become unmanageable, O’Neill explained. For instance, take an urban cluster of 100 LTE base stations, each supporting 50 Mb/s of capacity. If backhaul from those base stations were aggregated at a single point, the aggregation point would have to be served by a 5-Gb/s link, even though under practically no situation would every base station in the cluster simultaneously be operating a peak capacity. Ethernet, however, doesn’t require such dedicated paths through the network, allowing operators to distribute their capacity more effectively, O’Neill said. “You don’t have to do a tremendous over-build just to handle peak demands,” he said.

How big Verizon’s project will be depends largely on how much of its network is connected by fiber today. Verizon Partner Solutions senior vice president of marketing Quintin Lew said that Verizon today has many fibers running from VZW’s mobile switching offices to aggregation points and to many cell sites in high-traffic areas, but he said he could not reveal any exact numbers for competitive reasons.

Many analysts have estimated that only 10% of the cell sites in the US are connected by fiber today, so even if Verizon is proportionally ahead of the competition, it still has a major undertaking before it. Fiber to 90% of the cellsites in Verizon Communications’ footprint will likely mean covering every urban and suburban cell site and even the highway infrastructure linking those urban conglomerations together.

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