Some interesting news came out of last week’s Small Cell Summit 2013: half a dozen companies have formed a small cell wireless backhaul ecosystem around Cisco’s unified RAN backhaul offering, which is a vendor-neutral support for any access technology.
The companies include Blinq, DragonWave, Fastback Networks, NEC, Radwin, Siklu and of course, Cisco.
Partho Mishra, VP and GM of Cisco’s small cell group who gave a keynote at the summit, blogged about the small cell ecosystem and Cisco’s continued commitment to small cell original equipment manufacturers here.
Also from the summit, Siklu President Izik Kirshenbaum outlined several critical features for small cell backhaul: small and unobtrusive, so that they blend into cityscapes; reliable despite environmental conditions; and able to be installed quickly in order to minimize technicians’ time and traffic disruption and to keep costs low. Siklu, based in Israel, builds millimeter-wave backhaul systems for macro and small cells, and has a new EtherHaul-600T product available later this year that includes self-organizing network integration, which Kirenbaum said is another important piece of the puzzle.
“Zero-touch provisioning and commissioning based on SON principles is a critical enabler for mass deployment of small cell backhaul,” Kirshenbaum said. “Self-configuration and auto-alignment automate the process of adding backhaul nodes to the network, shorten the installation process, and increase reliability.”
The use of SON is certainly born out in an AirHop conference announcement: the company’s eSON software will be used in a South Korean small cell deployment by operator ARItel.
“The South Korean mobile market is very advanced and leading the way in building LTE hetnets,” said Yan Hui, AirHop’s co-founder and CEO. “Even before they started their LTE small cell rollout, operators are discovering how important it is to have advanced SON in place to make deployment and operation successful, and economically sensible.”
Industry awards were also announced by the Small Cell Forum; read about the details here.
