The line you hear most in our industry goes something like this: fiber is winning, satellite is taking off, and microwave backhaul is on its way out. I spent last week in Côte d’Ivoire and Nigeria, and that is not what I heard.
In seven days I held 18 meetings. I sat down with mobile network operators, ISPs, regulators, integrators, ecosystem associations, installers and project owners, as well as the French Consulate and the French business association. The seats at the table were different every time. The conversation was not.
Microwave is still doing the work
Fiber is expanding, and it should. Satellite is a real step forward. But in both markets, operators still rely on microwave for backhaul when a site has to be connected quickly, over a long distance, at a cost that makes the business case work. Nobody described it to me as a stopgap. It is what they reach for when the clock is running.
Spectrum is the bottleneck
Scarcity has moved from the planning stage to the daily operations stage. The lower frequencies are heavily congested, and interference is a growing pain that drags link performance down. A link that passes commissioning and then underperforms in the field costs the operator money every month.
So the question I kept hearing was less “where do we find more spectrum?” and more “how do we get more out of what we already hold?”
Three things every operator asked for
MNOs and ISPs gave me almost the same shopping list.
- Traffic only goes up, and a lot of the installed base was sized for a different era.
- Operational flexibility. On current equipment, almost any modification means a hardware adjustment in the field. That is a crew, a site visit and planned downtime, just to change a configuration. Operators know that does not scale.
- Resilience against interference. On congested spectrum, a link that holds up when conditions get noisy is worth more than one that only looks good on day one.
These are ordinary requests from people who run networks every day and are tired of paying an operational tax for choices made years ago.
Where the X-Series fits
Operators and ISPs welcomed our positioning, and they are eager to test. I take that seriously, because interest only counts once the equipment is on a real link.
The X-Series was designed around these pain points. Digital Carrier Aggregation across up to 32 RF channels, 98% spectrum utilisation and up to 20x the capacity of a conventional radio address the capacity question. Software-defined channel flexibility addresses the changes that currently need a site visit.
What I am taking home
Microwave will remain the fastest, most cost-effective way to connect much of West Africa. But the microwave that wins will not be the unit installed ten years ago and left alone. It will carry more capacity, be adjustable without a site visit, and hold up when the spectrum gets crowded.
I met the people who will make that call. They told me clearly what they need. Now we have to prove it on their networks.
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