Alaskan carrier seeing traffic boom

To say that the area Matanuska Telephone Association serves is not your typical independent territory is an understatement. With almost 10,000 square miles of Alaskan landscape to cover, the conditions for constructing new plant are limited by both an expansive terrain and an extremely abbreviated construction season. However, the Palmer, Alaska-based carrier still faces many of the same market challenges of their counterparts in the lower 48.

As wireless continues to grow, the company has found a healthy business backhauling traffic for other carriers (as well as its own wireless unit). That's the good news. The bad news is that with increased traffic comes rising demands from other carriers. Normally, that would mean bringing more copper pairs or fiber to a cell site, an option MTA tries to avoid because of cost. Instead, it's experimenting with Aktino's Ethernet-over-copper equipment at one cell site, giving it greater capacity without construction cost or time.

“Normally we would do fiber, but in this case, the customer premises [cell site] was in a residential area,” said Dennis Eby, broadband transmission engineer for MTA. More pressing was the fact that one wireless carrier was using the site to aggregate several others and then send traffic to MTA's central office. “It was about a 4600-foot loop, and we had plenty of copper pairs,” he said.

In fact, because the site was in a residential neighborhood, it was fed off a feeder cable with 25 pairs dedicated to the site. MTA is now using 12 of those pairs to run a DS-3 (45 Mb/s) from the location.

“The DS-3 itself is pretty transparent,” Eby said. “We hand it off to GCI [the inter-exchange carrier]. But in that binder group we've also got another 14 HDSL2 circuits — some going to the cell site; some going to other businesses. It was pretty neat to see all those running together.”

MTA's initial deployment is being watched closely by plenty of larger carriers, many of whom are seeing an exponential jump in bandwidth requirements as wireless providers deploy multimedia services, according to Hamid Lalani, senior vice president of marketing and product management for Aktino.

“It's one of those few things that's robustly growing in the telecom business,” he said. There are about 150,000 cell sites in North America, with only about 6.5% served by fiber and another 1% served by microwave, he added.

“Every telephone company has to be looking for new revenue, and cell sites are very profitable,” Lalani said. “They're one of those unique locations where CLECs can't compete.”