Backhaul · the high-capacity spine
Backhaul that carries the whole network to the upstream, fibre and wireless together.
Backhaul is the heavy-lifting path: the link that carries everyone's traffic back to the connection upstream. Sometimes that is fibre, sometimes it is a wireless hop to a site no trench will reach, and often it is both, designed to back each other up.
Fibre, wireless, or both
There is no single right medium for backhaul. The right design usually uses more than one.
Fibre
Unmatched capacity and latency over short, dense, high-demand runs. Worth the trench where the ground and the numbers suit it.
Wireless backhaul
Reaches across distance, terrain and water in days, not earthworks. The way to a tower or a remote site when trenching is slow, dear or impossible.
Hybrid by design
Fibre on the spine, wireless to the edges, each able to carry the load if the other drops. The mix that fits the real ground beats a dogmatic single medium.
Redundancy and failover
A second, diverse path so a cut fibre or a storm on one route does not take the whole site offline. Traffic moves to the survivor automatically.
Designing the backhaul
The capacity that carries everyone has to be planned, not guessed.
Capacity planning
We size for the peak and for growth, not just today's average, so the path still holds when every site is busy at once.
Clean aggregation
We bring multiple sites and sectors back to the upstream tidily, with the routing and addressing set up to scale rather than sprawl.
Diverse paths
Physically separate routes where the connection is critical, so one fault cannot down both at the same time.
We build the wireless, coordinate the civil
We deliver the wireless backhaul and integrate it with fibre, with trenching and splicing handled by licensed partners under one design.
How we build it
Map sites and demand
We list every site and sector feeding the path and add up the real demand, today and where it is heading.
Design fibre and wireless paths
We work out which legs are fibre, which are wireless, and where a diverse second path earns its keep.
Build, test and monitor
We deliver it, prove the capacity and the failover, and watch the backhaul so a problem on the spine is caught first.
Where backhaul design fits
WISP and tower backhaul
Carry aggregated subscriber traffic from the towers back to the upstream, with the capacity and the redundancy the network leans on.
Multi-site business
Tie campuses, depots and branches together and back to a central feed, blending fibre and wireless to suit each leg.
Reaching fibre from a remote site
Bridge the gap with wireless from a remote site to the nearest point fibre actually reaches.
A backup path for a critical link
Add a diverse wireless path behind a fibre service so an excavator through the conduit is an inconvenience, not an outage.
The pieces around the backhaul
Wireless backhaul is usually carried on microwave links, feeds a point-to-multipoint base or a string of point-to-point hops, and stands on the right towers. For enterprise and ISP-grade network design, this is delivered with our parent practice Alien IT Solutions.
Questions people ask
What is backhaul?
Backhaul is the heavy-lifting path that carries everyone's traffic back to the connection upstream. On a wireless network it is the link between the towers and the internet feed, and it needs more capacity than any single site, because it carries them all.
Do you lay the fibre yourselves?
We design the backhaul and build the wireless side. For the fibre itself, the trenching, conduit and splicing, we coordinate licensed civil and fibre partners. You deal with one team for the whole design.
Why not just use wireless for everything?
Wireless is the right answer for distance, terrain and reaching sites no trench will get to. Fibre still wins on raw capacity and latency over short, dense, high-demand runs. The best designs use each where it is strongest, and let them back each other up.
Can you build in redundancy?
Yes. A common design runs fibre as the primary path with a diverse wireless path as backup, or two physically separate routes, so a cut fibre or a storm on one path does not take the site offline.
How do you size the backhaul?
We size for the peak, not the average, and leave headroom for growth. We add up the demand from every site and sector feeding the path, then design capacity that still holds when everyone is busy at once.
One spine to carry the whole network.
Tell us the sites, the capacity and how critical the path is. We will design the backhaul, fibre and wireless, and price it.
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