Telecommunications company Alcatel-Lucent has expanded its mobile backhaul portfolio to meet the challenges of small cells.
Alcatel-Lucent said that small cells are compact-base stations that increase wireless capacity and coverage, where it is needed in busy public locations and highly populated areas.
The expanded portfolio will use the company’s Internet protocol (IP)/multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) capabilities to offer an approach for supporting backhaul, whether it is delivered over optical fiber, copper or microwave.
Alcatel-Lucent said that new variants of its 7705 Service Aggregation Router (SAR) family will offer a flexibility to support any mobile service (3G, 4G LTE, Wi-Fi) over any backhaul access, using any networking topology.
The new 7705 SAR offerings provide a service layer for efficient OAM (operations, administration and management), while advanced timing/synchronization, flexible powering options, and auto-discovery and provisioning capabilities offer a common approach to small cell backhaul deployment.
The company has also expanded its microwave options by adding new 60GHz systems for point-to-point (P2P), line-of-sight applications and a sub-6GHz P2P and point-to-multipoint units.
Apart from expansion, the company has increased capacity in its 9500 Microwave Packet Radio and optimised its existing copper and fiber broadband access portfolio to meet small cell needs.
Alcatel-Lucent president of networks group Philippe Keryer said: "The combination of our strengths in IP, optics, microwave, fixed access and wireless puts us in a relatively unique position amongst the other vendors in the market, and places us in an ideal position to address the mobile backhaul challenge with the introduction of small cell deployments."
