When Time Warner needed to increase data transmission speed between its headends at Libby and Troy, Montana, Cable AML came up with the perfect solution. Cable AML designed an 18GHz bidirectional transmission system between the Libby and Troy headends through a repeater site on King Mountain. The previous system data interconnect delivered a capacity of 24.7 Mbps, transmitted over sixteen T1 lines.

The new transmission system provides a rate of 80 Mbps and can be increased to 155 Mbps by changing the modulation format through a software upgrade from 16QAM to 256QAM. King Mountain posed a more formidable challenge than spanning the 18 mile distance between the two headends. The 4,160 foot high mountain stood directly between the two microwave towers.

Dense forests of mostly mature, fir trees covered the high and low lands in between. In addition, snow and ice accumulations remain on the mountain for much of the fall, winter and spring. “Even in June the weather impedes access to the King Mountain site, so the job was completed in July after clearing some of the trees that were blocking the path”, said Ted Chesley, Sr. Microwave Field Engineer.

According to Corey Robertson, Network Engineer of Time Warner, “The high-capacity link is by far the most economical and best performing solution for high data rate trunking between remote headends.”