Even Exalt's licensed stuff is all done through bonded channels and multi radio configurations. Depending on your saturation in the area you could spend a long time and a lot of money with comsearch implementing a large network trying to hit those numbers. But like you say PTP 100 meter lab tests don't mean shit either, which is what all the marketing speak in these products is. 1 Gbps, 25 km+ range! Sure, love to see you do 1024QAM at 30 miles in the real world... with your 2ft integrated antenna. Don't get me wrong, we've had success in both 4.9 and 5.8 last mile stuff, I really do like the technology and what it has done for cost effectiveness, but they're kind of going overboard with the carrier class, large backhaul, we can do it all, stuff now.
We did a design for a Statewide deployment using one of these companies and it ended up being almost exactly the same price as quotes from larger microwave vendors; Alcatel, Aviat, MNI, etc... Because once you add everything required for performance requirements, it ends up being more or less the same quote. Maybe someone gets away with a 6' UHX antenna and someone else wants an 8'.
We did some investigation using LTE as a backhaul solution a couple of years back and it just wasn't going to work. It has pretty much left my head but it just wasn't suited for the requirements of being a true backhaul network as opposed to a subscriber network, and just using like you said something like a PTP high throughout connection. It also had to utilize the, at the time, FirstNET requirements as we understood them. So that could have had something to do with it.
