New Rain Rate Statistics for Emerging Regions: Implications for Wireless Backhaul Planning

— As demand for broadband service increases in emerging regions, high-capacity wireless links can accelerate and cost-reduce the deployment of new networks (both backhaul and customer site connection). Such links are increasingly common in developed countries, but their reliability in emerging regions is questioned where very heavy tropical rain is present. Here, we investigate the robustness of the standard (ITU-R P.837-6) method for estimating rain rates using an expanded test dataset. We illustrate how bias/variance issues cause problematic predictions at higher rain rates. We confirm (by construction) that an improved rainfall climatology can largely address these prediction issues without compromising standard ITU fit evaluation metrics.