Updated 22 January to include additional information provided by Ericsson.
Ericsson and Deutsche Telekom demonstrated a 40 Gbps data rate over a 1.4 km radio link at E-Band, 4x higher than commercially available wireless radio products. The round-trip latency of the link was less than 100 μs.
Ericsson did not disclose the exact frequency, bandwidth, modulation or number of antenna polarizations used in the demonstration.
Responding to a request from Microwave Journal, Ericsson said the demonstration used two 2 GHz channels, i.e., a total bandwidth of 4 GHz, with 128-QAM modulation and two polarizations per antenna (i.e., four antennas).
The high data rate is achieved by the combination of XPIC and 10 Gbps in a 2 GHz wide channel, thereby generating a 20 Gbps data stream that in combination with a second 2 GHz channel and link aggregation (LAG) realizes a 40 Gbps full duplex channel. Although the key technologies are known and mature, this is a pre-commercial solution that for the first time shows the combination of polarization multiplexing (XPIC) with ultra-high bandwidth and a combined bitrate of 40 Gbps.
Ericsson said the trial used technologies that are “mature and proven.” The 40/100 Gbps routing interface used a commercial Ericsson 6675 router distributing the 40 Gbps data stream using LAG over four 10 Gbps MINI-LINK ML6352 radios. Each radio used 2 GHz of bandwidth, where two radios share a 2 GHz channel by using XPIC, so only 4 GHz bandwidth is required.
Claiming a record data rate at millimeter wave frequencies, Ericsson said the demonstration shows point-to-point radio can achieve the data capacity and latency needs of 5G networks.
The trial was conducted at the Deutsche Telekom Service Center in Athens using Ericsson’s MINI-LINK 6352 microwave radio and 6000 router.
“A high performance transport connection will be key to support high data throughput and enhanced customer experience in next-generation networks. While fiber is an important part of our portfolio, it is not the only option for backhaul. Together with our partners, we have demonstrated fiber-like performance is also possible with wireless backhauling/X-Haul solutions. This offers an important extension of our portfolio of high capacity, high performance transport options for the 5G era.” — Alex Jinsung Choi, SVP for strategy and technology innovation at Deutsche Telekom