The rapid growth of multimedia broadband wireless services has placed huge pressure on the backhaul infrastructure. As cost-effective alternatives to fibre backhauls, high speed microwave backhauls provide a number of significant benefits, especially for bringing broadband services to rural and regional areas. This article addresses the challenges to wireless backhauls and presents a multi-gigabit microwave backhaul system, called Ngara backhaul, which is being developed at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia. The various innovative aspects of the Ngara backhaul system including spectrum aggregation, peak-toaverage power ratio reduction, out-of-band emission cancellation, and sample rate conversion, are reported.