I'm going to steal my introduction here:
Optimizing bandwidth utilization has become more critical even though simultaneously technology is evolving to improve bandwidth throughput — whether it’s wireless, over copper (DSL, T1, E1, etc.) or fiber. The reason is simply cost and the resultant margins. In an increasingly competitive telcom/datacom landscape, keeping your costs low with the highest possible profit margin is critical. In most wireless networks, operators bear the recurring cost of traffic backhauling in order to connect geographically dispersed cell sites with their core networks. As access networks have been built out to support wireless services, each newly deployed service has required additional dedicated transmission equipment (such as leased lines, satellite trunks, or microwave links) between the base station and the base station controller. According to NMS Communications, this backhaul cost can represent up to 20–30 percent of total network operating expenses (OpEx). By reducing the number of these connections, operators can eliminate a significant portion of network OpEx.
Today, Rich Tehrani points me to a relatively new TMCNet channel called Wireless Backhaul covering the lastest happenings in the wireless backhaul space.
Here's a teaser.
Wireless service providers migrating their mobile offerings to packet-based 3G and 4G/LTE/WiMAX technologies are facing a significant increase in bandwidth demands (up to 20 times today’s rates by 2012) over their wireless backhaul networks, whether their own or leased from ILECs or alternative access providers. To provide this level of capacity in a cost-efficient manner, wireless backhaul is migrating to Ethernet from T1 TDM private lines.
Now go check out the wireless backhaul channel.