Cyan Launches CyAlliance Wireless Backhaul Program

February 3, 2018

Cyan today launched CyAlliance – a multi-vendor partnership program delivering compelling, interoperable and easily supported next-generation solutions to help service providers maximize wireless backhaul opportunities.

Market leading wireless backhaul equipment providers including ANDA Networks, Dragonwave, Hatteras Networks and Overture Networks have joined CyAlliance, giving wireless backhaul service providers multiple technology choices for robust, scalable access and transport solutions.

“The industry is entering another era of accelerated technology innovation”

CyAlliance provides interoperability assurance through verification testing, rapid problem resolution through pre-defined escalation processes, and collaboration on advanced architectural considerations such as end to end packet synchronization in multi-vendor environments.

While CyAlliance’s initial focus is aligned toward wireless backhaul, the program and its partners will expand to focus on a much broader range of evolving services and technologies.

“The industry is entering another era of accelerated technology innovation,” said Frank Wiener, vice president of marketing and business development for Cyan.

“While services have switched from TDM to packet, the network and industry standards for packet transport continue to evolve, creating new opportunities and potential multi-vendor challenges for service providers.

CyAlliance was established to mitigate those risks and empower service providers to pick best-in-class solutions satisfying their requirements for copper, fiber or microwave based backhaul in combination with scalable packet optical transport.”

With a rapidly expanding and diverse base of customers, Cyan and CyAlliance partners are helping service providers win highly valued wireless backhaul projects in multiple markets.

Cyan’s Z-Series’ scalable packet transport of high growth 3G/4G services with industry leading SLA parameters as well as optional support of 2G/3G TDM based services using SONET/SDH gives backhaul network providers the flexibility to meet the varying needs of individual wireless service providers.

Cyan’s Z-Series working in harmony with the diversity of CyAlliance partner’s access systems provides the ultimate flexibility to satisfy wireless backhaul and expand into other high margin services.

“IRIS provides regional transport services for numerous ILECs, CLECs, ISPs and other carriers across the major and rural markets of Tennessee and select adjacent states,” added Peter De Bono, vice president of engineering for IRIS Networks.

“Our customers and member companies support a wide range of services, including wireless backhaul.

“We selected Cyan to expand and upgrade our network because the Z-Series satisfies the diverse needs of our customers with a level of scalability, density, ease of management and economics that clearly separated Cyan from the alternatives.

“Building upon that leadership with CyAlliance to further simplify the planning, implementation and operations across multiple vendor solutions further improves our ability to reliably serve our customers.”

Service Providers Face Common Challenge of Scaling Traffic on Flat Revenues

It’s widely recognized that wireless networks are experiencing unprecedented growth.

What’s less apparent is that the increase in traffic is not driving an equivalent increase in revenue. With declining voice revenues, the modest increases in data revenues often result in flat overall revenues per subscriber.

Consequently, wireless providers are seeing the same decrease in revenue per transmitted bit that’s occurring across the wireline industry.

The dichotomy of investing in the network to increase scale when the revenue per bit is simultaneously declining is challenging all service providers to find new ways to reduce the cost of transport.

Cyan’s revolutionary Z-Series of multi-layer transport platforms with CyMS, the industry’s first multi-layer management system, materially reduce both capital and operational expenses across metro and regional transport networks.

Cyan’s launch of the CyAlliance program is aimed at extending that capital and operational efficiency from the tower to the core.

CyAlliance Partner Solutions Address Multiple Wireless Backhaul Architectures

Wireless backhaul providers are aggressively deploying fiber to the tower solutions.

In these cases, CyAlliance partners offer a compelling range of fiber based native Ethernet, Ethernet over TDM and Ethernet plus TDM based backhaul systems.

However, fiber is not available in every market.

For these situations, CyAlliance partner systems provide the flexibility to exploit existing T1/E1 infrastructures as well as bonded DSL to enable a phased approach to higher capacities and Ethernet over copper transport.

When copper and fiber are either insufficient or unattractive, microwave based CyAlliance systems provide further innovative options for scaling backhaul capacity.

Uplinks from these local access systems are then aggregated using one or more of Cyan’s multiple Z-Series’ service modules providing high performance Carrier Ethernet, SONET/SDH, OTN or wavelength transport services.

The ability to mix and match service modules and scale transport capacity from one to 4, 8 or 40 10G wavelengths per fiber provides the scalability necessary to support metro and region wide wireless backhaul services with plenty of capacity for metro Ethernet, IPTV, VOD, internet access, TDM and wavelength services.

Going beyond copper, fiber and microwave based technology options CyAlliance recognizes the industry trend toward native packet solutions.

As wireless network infrastructures migrate to pure packet transport, special considerations must be given to network synchronization and performance.

Cyan and CyAlliance partners recognize the importance of pure packet infrastructures and standards for maturing technologies such as Synchronous Ethernet and IEEE 1588v2.

Recognizing that customers want end-to-end solutions, CyAlliance ecosystem partners will collaborate to provide best practices guidelines for multi-vendor implementations of these and other relevant industry standards.