16 December 2008
Filed in Energy efficiency
The arrival of the recent Unstrung Insider report “Mobile’s Green Challenge” got me thinking about what the microwave backhaul community can do about reducing the amount of electrical power it takes to run a backhaul network.
We like to think that we are pretty good at pointing out the benefits of microwave point-to-multipoint architecture here at Cambridge Broadband Networks, but it became clear reading the Unstrung report that the benefits of using PMP to reduce power consumption are considerable as well! The way I see it, PMP and especially the way we implement it in VectaStar, is capable of making significant impact into reducing the power consumed in the backhaul network.
The first benefit should be obvious: PMP backhaul networks have nearly half the number of radios compared to point-to-point solutions and as such, consume nearly half as much electrical power. This varies, of course, depending on which PTP microwave solution you may choose to make a comparison with, but the reduction is still significant. As we move into 2009, in the face of the mobile backhaul explosion, operators planning how to densify their networks would be well advised to add ‘power consumption reduction’ to the list of criteria as they consider microwave backhaul systems.
The second benefit is not so obvious: VectaStar is, and always has been, a remote radio head technology. The baseband and radio is integrated into a single, mast-mounted unit that does not require specialised air-conditioning in the hut to maintain the radio at operating temperature. Long RF cable runs from the hut to the antenna require high levels of power. VectaStar, with its integrated terminal and slip-fit antenna-mount technology, eliminates long cable runs and speeds up installation time. Furthermore, VectaStar has been installed in locations as cold as Finland and Siberia as well as the heat of the Middle East so operating temperature range is not an issue either!
The third benefit is more obscure still. If you took-up the offer from my colleague Deyan Boyich in the last edition of Infocast to learn more about the 2009 VectaStar roadmap, you will know that we have considerably more capacity and bandwidth coming to VectaStar very soon. This additional performance – tripling the capacity – comes with little increase in power consumption, thanks to the proprietary ASIC technology developed by and exclusive to Cambridge Broadband Networks’ VectaStar.
So, there you have it: half the power conception, remote radio head and significantly more capacity. It certainly seems like VectaStar should be high on the list of any transmission planner trying to reduce power consumption!
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