Microwave link capacity

Mon Apr 4 18:27:39 UTC 2016

--- jfmezei_nanog at vaxination.ca wrote:
From: Jean-Francois Mezei <jfmezei_nanog at vaxination.ca>

In a context of providing rural communities with modern broadband.

Reading some tells me that Microwave links can be raised to 1gbps. How
common is that ?

I assume that cell phone towers have modern microwave links (when not
directly on fibre). What sort of capacity would typically be provided ?

And in the case of a remote village/town served by microwave originally
designed to handle just phone calls, how difficult/expensive is it to
upgrade to 1gbps or higher capacity ? Just a change of radio ? or radio
and antenna, keeping only the tower ?
-----------------------------------------------

It depends on the system installed.  For example, with Aviat 
Eclipse ODU 600 you can start out small and grow.  They have
an "Eclipse Node" that supports throughput capacities to 
366 Mbit/s Ethernet, 100xE1, 127xDS1, 4xDS3, STM1+1E1, or 
2xSTM1/OC3.  If you upgrade to their "Packet Node" it will
support Gigabit bandwidth in addition to the above BWs.
They have regular slots and you just change cards.

scott