DragonWave today said it has broken the wireless backhaul speed barrier, announcing the latest generation of its wireless Ethernet radio, the Horizon Duo, which can deliver capacity up to 1.6 Gb/s.

The high-capacity radio is targeted at aggregation points of current 3G and WiMAX networks, but eventually the high capacity demands of 4G networks could push the high-capacity link further toward the network edge as individual base stations start requiring hundreds of megabits per second of transport capacity. Keeping its eye on current operator demands, though, Dragonwave will offer versions of the Duo radio for lower capacity links that can be software-upgraded later to full 1.6 Gb/s.

“Our 10 Mb/s product will be more expensive than another product built specifically for 10 Mb/s, but we have flexibility,” said Alan Solheim, vice president of product management for Dragonwave. As operators need to up capacity, they simply purchase a license for higher capacity rather than buying new radio gear or provisioning costly fiber lines, he said.

The Duo gets its name because of a dual-pole cross polarization scheme the radio uses, which effectively allows it to double the capacity it can squeeze out of any new technology innovation in its radio line. Its bandwidth estimates are for 56 MHz of spectrum in both unlicensed and licensed bands spanning 11 GHz to 38 GHz. In the US, where 50 MHz swathes of spectrum are more common, the Duo can achieve 1.4 Gb/s to 1.5 Gb/s of capacity, Solheim said.