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Wazco and Athena Wireless Communications announced that they have collaborated on Wazco’s new MetroHaul, an industry-first solution that combines Wazco’s MetroStorm multi-sector LTE metrocell for mobile broadband coverage and capacity with Athena’s A060-Mini Radio for fiber-comparable wireless backhaul and data transfer.

In a May 17, 2011 Informa market status report, “Status of the LTE Ecosystem,” 61 percent of the 527 respondents polled at the LTE World Summit either “agree or strongly agree” that they believe small cells will be more important than macro cells for an effective LTE deployment strategy.

“When it comes to 4G LTE infrastructure adaptation, small is rapidly becoming the next big thing,” opined Mike Nasco, CEO of Wazco. “A major issue with small cell networks, however, is matching the size, cost and performance of the backhaul to the small cell with the large-scale demands that metro-level infill LTE networks will require. The MetroHaul is designed specifically to provide economical backhaul for our family of high bandwidth, multi-sector metrocell solutions.”

Dubbed “LTE in a Streetlamp” by industry pundits, Wazco’s recently introduced MetroStorm is a multi-sector, high-performance, small base station for the LTE mobile-infrastructure market that addresses small-cell size and scalable performance issues with a truly innovative, self-contained, self-organizing, self-optimizing, street-level network element. It consists of a single self-contained, fully integrated enclosure, hosting up to four coordinated sectors, powered via standard interfaces available on streetlights, power poles and similar devices.

With the addition of the Athena Wireless A060-Mini millimeter-wave, point-to-point wireless backhaul radio, the Wazco MetroHaul addresses the need for short-range deployments of 50 to 1,000 meters and solves the challenge of transmitting large amounts of data through the air thus delivering significant use benefits and cost savings because it offers higher capacity data transmission, faster deployment and longer range. It operates in the 60GHz unlicensed band and is capable of transporting 1000Mbps of full duplex traffic up to a distance of a few kilometers, making it uniquely compatible with Ethernet transmissions.

“Athena’s A060-Mini multi-gigabit capacity and performance is comparable to fiber when handling cellular backhaul,” said Eduardo Tinoco, CEO of Athena. “The Wazco MetroHaul equipped with the A060-Mini delivers significant use benefits and cost savings because it offers higher capacity data transmission, faster deployment and longer range. Together our companies have solved one of the major issues that LTE small-cell offerings must face.”

For more information, visit www.wazco.com.

Wireless Design & Development