Huawei just upped the ante in the E-band radio market with their RTN 380. We just installed the very first of these links in the U.S., and so I’ll give you my impressions in my next couple of entries.
It started with a unique application where we had antenna space for only a single 1-foot dish (sandwiched between
two existing ones), but we needed to get twice the throughput as advertised by leading E-band vendors1. The customer is a genetics testing lab, where a single robot wants a 2 gig/second pipe, but if you Google leading E-band vendors you’ll see that their radios all top out at 1-1.25 Gbps
A few uncomfortable weeks passed
without a solution and then I saw an email from Huawei’s Seattle office,
introducing their “2nd Generation E-band microwave”. It was the 2 Gbps solution I
was looking for! But, a Chinese radio? Holy ghosts of Fessenden, Marconi, de Forest and Tesla! What
do the Chinese know about microwave? Well a lot, actually.
