In May this year, Saudi Telecom Company (STC) and Huawei jointly completed the commercial innovation of the world's first mid-frequency SuperLink link in Dammam. After more than 6 months of live network operation, the link has excellent stability and performance, meeting the design requirements. The SuperLink solution has a single-antenna and single-link bandwidth of 10Gbps, saving 67% of the antenna and 70% of the hardware, providing a minimalist and large-bandwidth solution for 5G suburban coverage.
As one of the pioneers in global 5G construction, Saudi Arabia has started large-scale construction of 5G networks since 2019. 60% of the 5G sites on the existing network use microwave bearer, and urban areas mainly use long-distance E-band bearer. For suburbs and outer suburbs, E-band coverage cannot be used due to the distance. However, the use of traditional frequency bands is limited by frequency resources, sky surfaces, and tower loads. The capacity of a single link does not exceed 5Gbps, which cannot meet 5G's demand for backhaul bandwidth, which greatly reduces the speed of STC's deployment of 5G in the suburbs.
In response to the above problems, Saudi STC and Huawei continued to innovate and developed a SuperLink solution to avoid parallel links, reduce the number of hardware by 70%, reduce antenna transportation, alignment costs, and tower rent by 67%, and greatly save TTM and TCO. The bandwidth of a single antenna and a single pipe in the conventional frequency band can reach 10Gbps, which can greatly increase the speed of 5G deployment in the suburbs while solving the problem of tower space load-bearing.
The SuperLink solution consists of the industry's first multi-frequency antenna and four-in-one carrier aggregation CA ODU:
The multi-frequency antenna can cover three large frequency bands of 6GHz, 7GHz, 8GHz or 13 GHz, 15 GHz, and 18GHz, which solves the problem that multiple antennas need to be installed to form parallel links when multiple frequency bands are combined to provide large bandwidth. In the process of bandwidth evolution, operators do not need to add an antenna for another frequency band, which relieves the space pressure on the tower and does not need to be re-aligned, making deployment and upgrade easier.
Four-in-one carrier aggregation CA (Carrier Aggregation) ODU integrates 4 channels in one hardware, which can reduce the number of ODUs by 75%, while supporting higher modulation modes and larger channel bandwidth, and increasing the capacity of a single ODU by 500% .
