WOW! Business, a communications and cloud service provider has been selected by multiple wireless operators to provide fiber backhaul for more than 500 cell towers in the Chicago metropolitan area. The demand for higher capacity wireless backhaul is driven by increasingly faster adoption of LTE Voice and Data Services.
WOW! will build 50-plus contiguous fiber rings connecting the cell tower base stations to mobile switching centers (MSC) that link to the global Internet backbone and public switched telephone network (PSTN). The first site will be operational in the 4th quarter of the year with full completion expected by 2017.
"Consumer hunger for new media-rich mobile communications, coupled with the dynamic explosion of voice, data and video traffic, is driving wireless carriers to increase bandwidth at their cell sites With hundreds of millions of people using smartphones, tablets and other devices to access bandwidth-intensive mobile applications, existing wireless backhaul capacity is quickly reaching its limits."
- Brad Cheedle, Senior Vice President, WOW! Business
"Fiber provides wireless carriers with a simple, high-capacity backhaul infrastructure and an extremely reliable and cost-effective way to move traffic from their cell sites to the broader voice, data and video networks ."
- Jim Greene, Senior Director, WOW! Wholesale
