This was a draft from a now-retired blog of mine called Broadband Wireless Internet Access (BWIA) Backhaul on 2008-03-12.
Dragonwave is now DragonWave-X. When I was actively writing in the late 1990s / early 2000s, Dragonwave was one of my favorite companies to cover. They had interesting products and superb Public Relations team which made writing about them very easy - interviews, photos, etc. were easily arranged.
These are bullet points only from my original notes. My memory is a bit fuzzy on this after 13 years. Some of this may well be incorrect as I never published this article and thus never got a chance to have it vetted for accuracy.
- One Indoor Unit (IDU) / Outdoor Unit (ODU) can achieve 800 Mbps with bonding channels (in one unit) (basic unit).
- Combining two IDU / ODUs onto one antenna using cross polarization can achieve 1.6 Gbps (enhanced unit).
- 50 MHz channels in North America, 56 MHz channels in Europe
- The trick is that they use a single Point to Point (P-P), can use adjacent channels, what they actually deliver is two 800 Mbps links, and then use a Router / Switch that uses link aggregation protocol.
- They'll sell a lot of Horizon Duos
- Has a Gigabit Ethernet and fiber interface
- Base version is 800 Mbps channel-bonding
- Can swap out IDU only for increased capacity
- Can upgrade from earlier AirPair product (which supported the dual radio duplexing cross polarization option. Upgrading the IDU is a 4x upgrade.
- Pseudowire solution - converge data and Time Division Multiplexing (TDM), keep wireless core as Internet Protocol (IP) since the majority of traffic is data. Quote: "IT folks are hard pressed to tell whether traffic originates on TDM or IP".
- Single solution, tight integration, single vendor
- Characterizing the overall latency and other characteristics of a link, changes the timing of the packets sent to the radio.
- With this new product, DragonWave is now emphasizing "service delivery unit". They did sell this sort of solution previously, but not aggressively. They're now selling this solution to carriers that are trying to evolve networks from TDM-only to high capacity data+TDM.
- DragonWave couldn't find a third party product that they could Original Equipment Manufacture (OEM) (slap their nameplate on and sell it as their product) that met the requirements of low-headaches and tight integration.
- Horizon Duo meets appropriate timing over packet standards.
- Integrated network versus parallel network headaches.
- Lowest capacity is 12-15 Mbps (might be $12k - $15k) for hardware capable of 800 Mbps, provisioned 10-20 Mbps (pay more for higher capacity, software key)
- Radios can be configured for any microwave band from 11 GHz to 38 GHz.
Thanks for reading!
Steve Stroh
Bellingham, Washington, USA
2021-03-15