What is "backhaul"

n. 1 (context transportation English) A return trip after delivery of cargo. 2 (context military English) The shipment of material to or through an area from which the material had previously been shippedUS FM 55-15 Transportation Reference Data; 9 June 1886. 3 (context travel aviation fare construction English) travel to a destination via a further point, (or a higher fare point), than the destination. (higher intermediate point) vb. To transmit (data or footage) from a remote site to a central site from where it is re-transmitted.

In the context of broadcasting, backhaul refers to uncut program content that is transmitted point-to-point to an individual television station or radio station, broadcast network or other receiving entity where it will be integrated into a finished TV show or radio show. The term is independent of the medium being used to send the backhaul, but communications satellite transmission is very common. When the medium is satellite, it is called a wildfeed.

Backhauls are also referred to sometimes as " clean feeds", being "clean" in the sense that they lack any of the post-production elements that are added later to the feed's content (i.e. on-screen graphics, voice-overs, bumpers, etc.) during the integration of the backhaul feed into a finished show. In live sports production, a backhaul is used to obtain live game footage (usually for later repackaging in highlights shows) when an off-air source is not readily available. In this instance the feed that is being obtained contains all elements except for TV commercials or radio ads run by the host network's master control. This is particularly useful for obtaining live coverage of post-game press conferences or extended game highlights ("melts"), since the backhaul may stay up to feed these events after the network has concluded their broadcast.

Electronic news gathering, including "live via satellite" interviews, reporters' live shots, and sporting events are all examples of radio or television content that is backhauled to a station or network before being made available to the public through that station or network. Cable TV channels, particularly public, educational, and government access (PEG) along with ( local origination) channels, may also backhauled to cable headends before making their way to the subscriber. Finished network feeds are not considered backhauls, even if local insertion is used to modify the content prior to final transmission.

There exists a dedicated group of enthusiasts who use TVRO (TV receive-only) gear such as big ugly dishes or "BUDs" to peek in on backhaul signals that are available on any of the dozens of broadcast satellites that are visible from almost any point on Earth. In its early days, their hobby was strengthened by the fact that most backhaul was analog and " in the clear" (unscrambled or unencrypted) which made for a vast smorgasbord of free television available for the technically inclined amateur. In recent years, full-time content and cable channels have added encryption and conditional access, and occasional signals are steadily becoming digital, which has had a deleterious effect on the hobby.

Some digital signals remain freely accessible (sometimes using K band dishes as small as one meter) under the international DVB-S standard or the US Motorola-proprietary Digicipher system. The small dishes may either be fixed (much like DBS antennas), positioned using a rotor (usually DiSEqC-standard) or may be toroidal in design (twin toroidal reflectors focus the incoming signal as a line, not a point, so that multiple LNBs may receive signal from multiple satellites). A "blind-search" receiver is often used to try every possible combination of frequency and bitrate to search for backhaul signals on individual communication satellites.

Backhaul may refer to:

• Backhaul (telecommunications), in telecommunications, concerned with transporting traffic between distributed sites (typically access points) and more centralized points of presence
• Backhaul (broadcasting), in the broadcast TV industry, the point-to-point transmission, usually by satellite, of a feed from a remote location to the studio
• Backhaul (trucking), in the transportation world, when a truck takes a load back to its originating terminal, e.g. to get a driver home

In trucking, a backhaul is a hauling cargo back from point B to the originating point A. Since it costs almost as much time to drive empty as fully loaded. This makes economic sense, since it helps to pay for the operating expenses for the trip back to the originating point A for the trucking company and/or trucker.

In a hierarchical telecommunications network the backhaul portion of the network comprises the intermediate links between the core network, or backbone network and the small subnetworks at the "edge" of the entire hierarchical network.

In contracts pertaining to such networks, backhaul is the obligation to carry packets to and from that global network. A non-technical business definition of backhaul is the commercial wholesale bandwidth provider who offers quality of service (QOS) guarantees to the retailer. It appears most often in telecommunications trade literature in this sense, whereby the backhaul connection is defined not technically but by who operates and manages it, and who takes legal responsibility for the connection or uptime to the Internet or 3G/4G network. See also hotspot contracts below.

In both the technical and commercial definitions, backhaul generally refers to the side of the network that communicates with the global Internet, paid for at wholesale commercial access rates to or at an ethernet exchange or other core network access location. Sometimes middle mile networks exist between the customer's own LAN and those exchanges. This can be a local WAN or WLAN connection, for instance Network New Hampshire Now and Maine Fiber Company run tariffed public dark fiber networks as a backhaul alternative to encourage local and national carriers to reach areas with broadband and cell phone that they otherwise would not be serving. These serve retail networks which in turn connect buildings and bill customers directly.

Cell phones communicating with a single cell tower constitute a local subnetwork; the connection between the cell tower and the rest of the world begins with a backhaul link to the core of the Internet service provider's network (via a point of presence). The term backhaul may be used to describe the entire wired part of a network, although some networks have wireless instead of wired backhaul, in whole or in part, for example using microwave bands and mesh network and edge network topologies that may use a high-capacity wireless channel to get packets to the microwave or fiber links.

A telephone company is very often the ISP providing backhaul, although for academic R&E networks or large commercial networks or municipal networks, it is increasingly common to connect to a public broadband backhaul. See national broadband plans from around the world, many of which were motivated by the perceived need to break the monopoly of incumbent commercial providers. The US plan for instance specifies that all community anchor institutions should be connected by gigabit fiber optics before the end of 2020.