The explosive growth in bandwidth demand due to the rapid movement of wireless technology from Generation to generation in recent years has made flexible and high bandwidth transport networks an absolute necessity. In the last 10 years, the world has seen many new applications make their way onto Wireless handsets. These applications range from browsing the web to streaming video or even live TV.
To serve these new applications that have come to the market relatively quickly, wireless carriers have been moving rapidly from generation to generation of wireless technology.
To give one an idea of how fast the rates are increasing, for example, bandwidth requirements for 2G GSM cell site was on the order of 1.2Mb/s while the bandwidth requirements for a GSM/Edge 2.75G cell site climbed to approximately 6Mbp/s. 3G (HSDPA) sites require approximately 20Mb/s and now 4G is taking that up into the hundreds of megabits per second.
So, what does this mean to a wireless backhaul network ?
To accommodate these higher rates, as wireless carriers move from 2G to 3G to 4G, they are migrating from traditional TDM architectures to Ethernet backhaul.