As we saw in the last article in this blog series, the disaggregation of the RAN has opened up a number of new and exciting opportunities for a larger ecosystem to grow and thrive. But nowhere has the momentum been felt more than in the last mile, specifically with regard to Fronthaul and with the Radio itself.
Traditional fronthaul technologies
Most of the current deployments of LTE macro cell sites consist of base station equipment located at the bottom of a tower and the radio or Remote Radio Head (RRH) located at the top. The base station, or Base Band Unit (BBU), and RRH are typically connected through a high bandwidth fiber connection – what we call fronthaul.