Setting out to prove the viability of using millimeter wave for wireless backhaul, Deutsche Telekom and Ericsson achieved a millimeter wave link with a data transmission rate of 40 Gbps.
It was part of a joint innovation project at the Deutsche Telekom Service Center in Athens, Greece. The achievement produced throughput four times greater than current commercial millimeter wave solutions.
The live trial was conducted at the Deutsche Telekom Service Center in Athens over a hop distance of 1.4 kilometers in the millimeter wave (E-band) spectrum. Technical setup included the use of Ericsson’s latest mobile transport technology, including Ericsson’s MINI-LINK 6352 microwave solution and Router 6000.
The test also zeroed in on the latency requirements in 5G network architecture to support low latency or ultra-low latency use cases. The round-trip latency performance of their link was less than 100 microseconds—confirming the positive contribution of wireless backhaul technologies to satisfy network-specific latency targets.
“A high-performance transport connection will be key to support high data throughput and enhanced customer experience in next-generation networks,” said Alex Jinsung Choi, SVP Strategy & Technology Innovation at Deutsche Telekom, in a press release. “While fiber is an important part of our portfolio, it is not the only option for backhaul. Together with our partners, we have demonstrated fiber-like performance is also possible with wireless backhauling/X-Haul solutions. This offers an important extension of our portfolio of high-capacity, high-performance transport options for the 5G era.”
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Per Narvinger, head of Product Area Networks, Ericsson, said microwave continues to be a key technology for mobile transport by supporting the capacity and latency requirements of 4G and future 5G networks. “Our joint innovation project shows that higher capacity microwave backhaul will be an important enabler of high-quality mobile broadband services when 5G becomes a commercial reality,” he added.