New 5G backhaul economy

Marcel Fouché, networking and storage general manager, Networks Unlimited Africa.

"Visionaries may state that 5G will offer access to new applications like artificial intelligence and smart city infrastructure that could define the next industrial revolution. Companies and countries failing to act now will find themselves left behind global and regional powers that are indeed investing in 5G. The New Backhaul Economy is poised to disrupt the traditional wireless backhaul ecosystem built for previous wireless generations.” says Raymond Hagen, Americas product manager at ProLabs.

5G is a revolutionary next-generation mobile network that is not just a technology implementation but shifts the entire network architecture paradigm. Wireless backhaul is the wireless communication and network infrastructure responsible for transporting communication data from end users or nodes to the central network or infrastructure and vice versa.

As Hagen notes, wholesale backhaul services in the 4G and earlier environments were simple and straightforward, and a backhaul provider could be assured of the fibre capacity for current and future data needs. Today, however, as we look ahead to the widespread rollout of 5G enhanced mobile broadband, we can see that it is able to achieve significantly improved data rates, but it also requires the pipes feeding the network to be super-sized.

Changes in infrastructure

Therefore, significant changes in infrastructure are required to effect the functionality of the fifth-generation technology standard for cellular networks. This includes the transition from backhaul into x-Haul (including fronthaul, midhaul and backhaul), with implications for mobile operators, network wholesalers and transport providers from both the technological and business aspects.

Fronthaul is a similar concept to backhaul, which, simply put, links the mobile network back to the wired network. Fronthaul is the connection between a new network architecture of centralised baseband controllers and remote standalone radio heads at cell sites. Similarly, midhaul could be the link between the controller or the radio head that feeds the next link.

Hagen says, “Internet of things, smart energy, smart agriculture, and critical performance applications such as driverless cars are a few of the many applications for 5G technology. The supporting 5G x-Haul architecture will require not only significant bandwidth upgrades in backhaul transport links but in the distribution (midhaul) and access (fronthaul) network segments. “…5G’s x-Haul architecture will aggregate data from multiple radios to distribution unit (DU) and central unit (CU) elements at significantly higher data rates than earlier generations. The fibre infrastructure required to aggregate 5G’s massive data requirements is central to the new backhaul economy.”