This week Tarana Wireless shared results from outdoor wireless tests conducted in conjunction with a service provider in congested lower Manhattan. The tests used production-ready Tarana products that are part of Tarana's AbsoluteAir universal wireless transport platform.
I wasn't able to find many technical details on how the system works, but the performance sounds interesting.
Berge Ayvazian, senior consultant, Heavy Reading, commented: “Tarana has created a new paradigm with its AbsoluteAir solution. I was truly impressed by the field demonstration I saw where wireless backhaul links were blocked by multiple buildings located about 1 kilometer apart. In addition, the antennas at both ends of the links were not even pointed in the same direction and yet attained their full 75 Mbps capacity. This is truly an industry first that will enable carriers to deploy wireless backhaul for outdoor small cells just about anywhere.”
Tarana said a true NLOS (non-line-of-sight) link was closed at every site location where it was attempted, with 100 percent of the links within 1 km and 75 percent of them between 1 and 3 km achieving the full 75 Mbps link capacity in a 10 MHz bandwidth.
Tarana's Concentrating Multipoint (CMP) technology was tested and it allowed multiple simultaneous channel links in a single 10 MHz channel without degradation of signal quality.
One end of the wireless connection used an AbsoluteAir node mounted on top of a 40 story building. It served as the link concentrator node. Additional AbsoluteAir nodes were mounted on 2-meter poles located on vehicles that were driven to move than 30 randomly selected locations at distances ranging from 100 meters to 3 km from the concentrator node. Tarana said that in all instances the wireless links were blocked completely by multiple and in some cases dozens of buildings. At the remote locations the antenna was coarsely aimed and the links were automatically established.
“I am excited to share these phenomenal results achieved in Manhattan that prove Tarana delivers unmatched deterministic performance and spectral efficiency even in the toughest of environments for wireless communications,” said Steve Sifferman, president and CEO of Tarana Wireless. “We have completed multiple tier one carrier trials this year on three continents where our AbsoluteAir products achieved similar results and demonstrated best in class performance.”
More information on the testing will be published on the Tarana Wireless website. Also see press release Tarana Wireless Achieves Unrivaled Results in Manhattan NLOS Tests.
The press release did not mention the frequency used for the testing, but based on other technical data on the website, it appears to be less than 6 GHz--most likely in the 5 GHz U-NII band.
What surprises me as much as the NLOS paths and data rate is the apparent lack of interference, which is often a problem in any band in New York City.
