At the Mobile World Congress on February 18, TE Connectivity introduced its Serial Link Combined, a 10-Gbit/sec optical-transport product that the company says reduces the amount of fiber needed in a small cell network. The Serial Link Combined (SLC) “is a CPRI [Common Public Radio Interface] rate muxponder that can support up to 225 MHz of spectrum over a single fiber pair,” TE Connectivity explains. “The SLC combines up to three, 3.072-Gbit/sec fiber links to a single 9.8304-Gbit/sec singlemode or multimode fiber pair.” Furthermore, each SLC chassis supports four of these links, for a combined 900 MHz of availability transport capacity.
As TE Connectivity further explains, the system works well for multiband and multi-operator mobile networks “where it is necessary to transport multiband RF to a designated service area, such as a large public venue or urban core, where there is high sectorization and capacity strain from the network.”
The amount of fiber needed for these links can be further reduced via wavelength division multiplexing (WDM), coarse WDM (CWDM) and dense WDM (DWDM). The system “works with any solution that transports at the 3.072-Gbit/sec data rate, including TE’s digital DAS solutions or remote radio heads, and small form pluggable [SFP] and SFP+ optical transceivers to transport high amounts of capacity several kilometers away,” the company says.
TE Connectivity sums up the SLC’s benefits in mobile networks as follows.
- Reduces fiber needed from up to three fiber pairs (six strands) to a single fiber pair (two strands)
- Reduces fiber-leasing requirements, thereby reducing operational expenses
- Each chassis supports four, 10-Gbit/sec links; each of these 10G links supports up to 225 MHz of RF spectrum
- Allows for the reuse of existing fiber infrastructure