Microwave Link Replacement

Microwave link replacement to cut O&M costs plus improve reliability

Do you only require a fraction of the bandwidth of your microwave communications links? 

Often our customers find they only utilize a small portion of the available bandwidth provided by microwave to their sites – a clear case of bandwidth overkill. With leased lines being unreliable and fiber being too expensive, customers turned to microwave as a suitable replacement that offered a licensed/protected circuit for their point-to point-needs.  While microwave provides higher reliability than leased lines, due to their operation in broadband spectrum, microwave systems therefore require customers to acquire considerably more bandwidth than they actually need.  Furthermore, given the size of the dishes, a microwave system requires dedicated towers that can withstand the weight therefore increasing the cost to operate such a system.

The cost-benefit analysis of microwave link replacement

Factoring in the cost to replace ageing microwave systems, the annual maintenance fees and the expense associated with your footprint (both on the tower and inside the equipment shack) and the cost-benefit argument for utilizing microwave links across your entire network fails to stack up.

While offering very high capacity communications ideal for the network center and across short paths, microwave links struggle to maintain their reliability during weather events where signal fading may occur – particularly over longer links.  Furthermore, due to their narrow antenna beamwidth, any offset due to ground movement in a natural disaster, such as an earthquake or flooding-induced landslip, can make a link fail.

Key benefits of replacing microwave links

Mimomax offers point-to-point links with ultra-low latency, ultra-high reliability and full duplex aggregate data rates of 1280 kbps in a 50 kHz channel.  Due to the compact nature of the antennas, a Mimomax system can also be deployed on existing infrastructure, saving costs in renting tower space. The key benefits you’ll experience in swapping out microwave links for narrowband:

• Reduce Operations & Maintenance costs associated with maintenance and footprint rental fees of microwave transmission;
• Improve your network reliability with communications links designed to cope with adverse meteorological conditions;
• Disaster-proof your mission critical links with wide beamwidth radio antennas;
• Deploy longer links in one-hop, reducing equipment in your network.

Try our free Path Assessment below to find out whether our award-winning Tornado radios could be the ideal swap out for your ageing microwave links.