Mobily Backhauls With Cambridge

CAMBRIDGE, U.K. -- Saudi Arabian operator Mobily, partially owned by UAE operator Etisalat, has awarded Cambridge Broadband Networks a significant contract for the provision of its VectaStar, point-to-multipoint, microwave backhaul platform.

Mobily is using VectaStar in the licensed 26GHz spectrum band to backhaul its 3G high speed packet access (HSPA) network. The initial deployment was in Saudi Arabia’s capital city, Riyadh, in 2008, with installations also underway in the Western Region (Jeddah , Mekah and Medinah ), the Eastern Province (Al-Khobar , Dammam and Dhahran) as part of its plans to expand its VectaStar network nationwide.

After a thorough benchmarking against legacy point-to-point technologies, Mobily selected VectaStar because it provides significantly greater capacity within the same spectrum allocation. Its future-proof architecture gives Mobily the confidence to invest in an infrastructure perfectly in line with its plans for rapid growth in data services. VectaStar has also proven to be flexible and fast to deploy in other installations in the region.

“Our HSPA network continues to grow quickly, and our backhaul network needs to be able to cope with rapidly increasing data traffic,” said Nasser Al-Nasser, Mobily’s CTO-MRN. “VectaStar provides us with the capacity and scalability we need to get new services to our customers before our competitors. It is unique in its ability to optimise and statistically-multiplex mobile broadband data traffic from our 3.75G base stations. Furthermore, its support for a wide variety of traffic protocols gives us great confidence in its ability to support our current and future ventures.”

Cambridge Broadband Networks Ltd.

Etihad Etisalat Co. (Mobily)