LAS VEGAS--Tellabs said at CTIA’s Wireless 2006 that it has expanded the capability of the Tellabs 5500 digital cross-connect to support the increasingly bandwidth-intensive needs for backhaul of 3G mobile networks.

Antti Kankkunen, vice president of network evolution at Tellabs, said the improvements will help 40% to 50% savings in backhaul transmission bandwidth through elimination of idle transmissions and packetization of cell site traffic. “We can do a seamless migration of our backhaul capabilities from the TDM world to the current ATM needs to IP,” he said. “We are also improving the capacity by 50%, but reducing the footprint by one-third.