Author: Stuart Little, Director, International Product Line Marketing

Have you heard the buzz about Multi-Band? Multi-Band combines traditional microwave channel alongside an E-Band (80 GHz) channel, joining the capacity of the latter with the high availability of the former. Multi-Band makes E-Band carrier-class over longer distances, making it a much more viable and deployable solution for 5G backhaul.

For years, E-Band has been touted as the next big thing. Likewise, 80GHz technology and solutions have been around for several years, yet the demand has not taken off. Why is that? Well, there are a few excellent reasons:

Author: Stuart Little, Director, International Product Line Marketing

Multi-Band, not microwave or millimeter-wave, is the solution for 5G Backhaul.

Why? Microwave bands are limited in capacity, particularly in countries and bands where spectrum is limited due to congestion. Even if you can get additional frequencies, scaling capacity means aggregating multiple channels that results in high equipment costs and potentially expensive recurring spectrum fees. E-Band alone is not sufficient either. With more bandwidth available that enables higher capacities, E-Band suffers from a number of potential limitations, from short link distances and high susceptibility to rain outage and pole/tower sway to difficult and time-consuming installation/antenna alignment.

Aviat Design, Aviat’s cloud-based link planning application, supports WTM 4800 E-Band and Multi-band designs. Aviat Design is the industry’s first and only integrated Multi-band link design solution showing a combined view of availability and capacity for the link. This enables easy, fast, intuitive E-Band and Multi-Band designs (all specs included, no pathloss files to download or update, easy cloud access). Popular design tools will require 2 separate link calculations for Multi-Band, and will not result in a combined design for the link, making it virtually impossible to understand the expected link performance or capacity or estimate the proper antenna size. Aviat Design is FREE for use at www.aviatcloud.com.

Multi-Band involves combining E-Band (70-80GHz) with traditional microwave (6-42GHz) on a single microwave link, usually with a single antenna on each end. Multi-Band drastically improves availability and distance of E-Band links and addresses other issues like pole sway and antenna alignment. If you are thinking of E-Band or microwave, consider Multi-Band, in particular single-box Multi-Band. Check out our infographic below to find out how single-box Multi-Band means high value at a cost that makes sense.