That market doesn’t compensate for the reduction in microwave in the Tier 1 space.
AT&T buys thousands of links. Even small WISP’s will only have maybe 10 or 20 links… they might only have 10 or 20 tower sites :-) But SAF’s growth in North America is primarily because of the WISP market. We embrace it, love it, and love to grow with you guys. That is why we focus on all outdoor, high quality, low cost solutions. Daniel White | Managing Director SAF North America LLC Cell: (303) 746-3590 Skype: danieldwhite E-mail: <mailto:daniel.wh...@saftehnika.com> daniel.wh...@saftehnika.com From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Chuck McCown Sent: Thursday, January 15, 2015 7:34 AM To: af@afmug.com Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Licensed backhaul pricing - still ridiculous Many cell towers are fiber in our area where they were radio a few years ago. That trend will continue. More licensed backhauls for smaller wisps should be a growth area I would think or has that market peaked too? From: Daniel White <mailto:afmu...@gmail.com> Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2015 10:58 PM To: af@afmug.com <mailto:af@afmug.com> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Licensed backhaul pricing - still ridiculous *soapbox* Demand in the overall marketplace has dropped for… 3 years straight now I think? Believe it or not – many of the LTE builds (at least in NA) are done for microwave. AT&T stopped building about 6 months ago – many of their contractors went out of business. Millimeter wave and fiber are the technologies of choice. If you can get your hands on the EJL Wireless Microwave Reports they are very interesting – but you have to pay thru the nose to get them. 2015 is supposed to be a growth year… but only by a few percent over previous years… same with 2016. 2017 and 2018 are predicted to be negative years. Africa and Asia are the potential growth markets – but the instability in those regions can put major builds on hold quickly. The gear has either dropped significantly in price (I remember purchasing DragonWave Airpair Release 3 links for $20k+ for 100Mbps) or increase in capability. If the vendors were killing it – DragonWave, Ceragon, Aviat, etc. would not be reporting double digit million dollar losses annually. What happened with Exalt in 2014 wouldn’t have had happened. Aviat wouldn’t be going thru a major restructuring. Hard to decode the books for Ericson and Huawei since microwave revenue is disguised among other things – but they are making it based on LTE base station sales – the microwave often times is flat out given away for the services and LTE base station sales. Of course you can say that other circumstances were the cause for those loses – but sales solves everything right? Hard to give actual annual results as each manufacturer has different fiscal years… but many are reporting ~$50mil losses. Only one vendor in 2013 showed growth in terms of terminal sales that doesn’t sell millimeter wave gear (SAF). Sub10, Siklu, Alcoma, and BridgeWave were the others that showed growth (all of this at least is according to the EJL Wireless Report). 2014 numbers will be interesting (but a few months away). Margins for vendors and distributors/resellers are probably at an all-time low for this gear. No one is killing it. Look at the financials of all the publically traded companies out there that specialize in microwave gear (Ceragon, SAF, DragonWave, Aviat are probably the easiest). Ericsson, NEC, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, etc. are publically traded as well but are so diversified I don’t think numbers for them are meaningful. There are more than 20 vendors in this space – compare that to your PtMP options (Telrad, Cambium, and Ubiquiti probably being the most discussed at the moment). Consolidation is coming in this space I’m sure… with less true pure OEM’s being able to make a viable business case to stay afloat. Also – in the drive for diversification of feature sets – manufacturers are moving back to custom modems (where most last gen radios where built with Broadcom modems primarily). Long term that probably does the opposite of what the market wants – better feature set – but not a reduction in cost. These radios are expensive to produce – especially to comply with ETSI and other governing body regulations. They also take a lot of pre-sales and pre-sales engineering work to get the sale. The Ubiquiti model doesn’t work in this space (or at least until they show us how to do it ;-) I love my company though – and I love this space. But it is competitive, and the margins are certainly lower than they should be to support the R&D and other services I think all of the manufacturers want to provide. *\soapbox* Anyways my observations of someone on the manufacturing side for the last few years. Pulling from the conversations in back bars with reps from other companies, and of course having worked for two backhaul manufacturers. Views above are solely my own – and probably not worth the bits it is taking up in your inbox :-) Daniel White (303) 746-3590 From: Af [mailto:af-boun...@afmug.com] On Behalf Of Mike Hammett Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2015 9:38 PM To: af@afmug.com <mailto:af@afmug.com> Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Licensed backhaul pricing - still ridiculous With all of the licensed gear going in world-wide for LTE backhaul, I'd say there are more units moving than you'd think. Maybe it's that demand that's keeping prices up? I'd think that licensed backhauls would fit into the category of halve the cost, more than double your sales. In the Excel sheet I've compiled so far today, the prices range from $8.47/megabit/s to $23.86/megabit/s. That covers five vendors as well as uncompressed and compressed data rates. The cheapest actually isn't a compressed radio. Just dead simple bits. Should get some more prices in tomorrow morning. ----- Mike Hammett Intelligent Computing Solutions http://www.ics-il.com <https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL> <https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions> <https://twitter.com/ICSIL> _____ From: "Josh Reynolds" <j...@spitwspots.com <mailto:j...@spitwspots.com> > To: af@afmug.com <mailto:af@afmug.com> , "Erich Kaiser" <er...@northcentraltower.com <mailto:er...@northcentraltower.com> >, memb...@wispa.org <mailto:memb...@wispa.org> Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2015 10:31:23 PM Subject: Re: [AFMUG] Licensed backhaul pricing - still ridiculous It's not a mass market item. On January 14, 2015 7:30:13 PM AKST, Erich Kaiser <er...@northcentraltower.com <mailto:er...@northcentraltower.com> > wrote: After several years, when will we see Licensed radios come down in price? There is so much margin in these things. Its ridiculous.... -- Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
