Horizon Quantum delivers microwave capacity

The solution provides more bandwidth than legacy microwave solutions - up to a 4Gbps per link.

Quantum requires half as much carrier rack space and integrates key nodal intelligence that enables network operations to be streamlined and simplified.

Dr John Saw, chief technology officer of Clearwire, one of Dragonwave's customers, said: 'To meet the growing demand for high-speed mobile connectivity, we need increasingly powerful, intelligent and cost-efficient solutions to capitalise on demand for bandwidth-intensive and runtime-sensitive applications.

'Horizon Quantum will help us achieve even higher capacity in our backhaul network to serve the increasingly high-bandwidth demands of our customers,' he added.

A native Ethernet implementation delivering good capacity and supporting sub-0.1ms latencies, the new Dragonwave solution is optimised for the rollout of 4G services.

The Horizon Quantum's Bandwidth Accelerator allows it to achieve superior spectral efficiency and redefine the capacity standard for packet microwave, according to the company.

The half-rack-unit device incorporates key nodal intelligence features that yield significant cost efficiencies.

Thanks to its integrated switching capability, for example, Horizon Quantum can perform aggregation and serve as a switch for ring and mesh network architectures.

This enables carriers to reduce the equipment deployed, powered and maintained in their networks.

The Dragonwave solution's flexible, user-scalable bandwidth enables simple and remote scaling without truck rolls, affording carriers key operational cost benefits.

Berge Ayvazian, senior advisor with Yankee Group, said: 'The gap between bandwidth demand and revenues continues to widen for many carriers in their march towards 4G services, so they are eager to adopt innovations that transform network operations.

'Service providers need to be able to deliver more low-latency bandwidth - up to 100Mbps per site - at a lower cost per bit than has been possible.

'Horizon Quantum promises to make carrier-grade, high-bandwidth native Ethernet transport with the scale required to meet the needs of 4G mobile Internet backhaul.' Horizon Quantum - scheduled to ship by the end of 2009 - delivers interference-free performance in both licensed and unlicensed radio frequencies in the 6GHz to 38GHz range.

The carrier-grade Dragonwave solution enables service reliability, delivers advanced security and encryption and fully supports SynchE and other critical Ethernet data transport capabilities such as virtual local area network (VLAN) queuing/prioritisation, flow control and jumbo packets.

Its pseudowire capability enables Ethernet and Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) traffic to be collapsed on a single, packet-based network.

Horizon Quantum is said to be simple to install, configure and maintain and can be remotely managed.

The company will showcasing this solution at 4G World in Chicago on 15-18 September.