IDG Contributor Network: Fronthaul and backhaul: Look out, a fusion is coming!
Backhaul and fronthaul have come a long way through the generations. When I started out, fronthaul was literally the length of industrial coax cable that you could easily observe running from the bottom of a cell phone tower to the top. Backhaul was always where the excitement was—in all the signal processing smarts surrounding transcoding. This technology existed to condense almighty 64k bit/sec. pipes down to a 16k bit/sec. ones and vice versa.
Today, the story has moved on and converged quite a bit, but the uncoordinated shaping of these spaces in those early days has resulted in two worlds or two heterogeneous technology silos, one each for fronthaul and backhaul. This is not going to fly in 5G, and a fusion is coming that will bring these two worlds together.
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