CENX, a player in the Carrier Ethernet exchange business, has scored a backhaul deal with LightSquared, which aims to build a nationwide wholesale LTE network using satellite spectrum.
CENX earlier this year made its Carrier Ethernet exchanges aggregation points available to Ethernet wireless backhaul access providers. The company's value proposition is that it can deliver simplicity and savings to mobile broadband operators by assisting them in accessing any market and aggregating multiple access providers to obtain total coverage of the cell sites they need to reach. As for the deal with LightSquared, CENX will eventually support 40,000 towers with its wireless backhaul exchange platform.
In an interview with FierceTelecom, Nan Chen, president of CENX, said the company will be able to deliver a 37-percent savings on backhaul costs to mobile operators like LightSquared. "Wireless providers will spend about a half billion to $2 billion a year on backhaul circuits alone to deliver 4G LTE so 25-37 percent savings is a big deal," he said.
CENX is also touting its operational simplicity via its proprietary OSS platform so that operators can access multiple service providers to get the best price. In addition, those operators dealing with Ethernet backhaul have had difficulty working with multiple classes of service, Chen said. Unlike multiple T1 lines, which have real-time classes of service, Ethernet-based backhaul enables operators to establish specific Class of Service (CoS) specification for both real-time delay sensitive traffic such as voice and a lower CoS for best-effort data.
Chen said CENX's platform overcomes these challenges by including systems and processes to conduct the integration of various backhaul providers. The OSS system includes a set of processes for order fulfillment, tracking, provisioning, turn up testing, and operational performance/fault monitoring for Ethernet-based wireless backhaul.
For more:
- see this FierceTelecom article
- see the release
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