Tantra Analyst

5G FWA Broadband: A Better Option For Urbanites, Increased Access For Ruralites

Have you noticed cellular speeds zoom past your home cable/DSL speeds, and wondered what gives? The reason is simple: The speed of innovation in the cellular industry far exceeds that of the wired world. Thanks to 5G, fixed wireless access (FWA) is primed to be supercharged by cellular technology.

In developed economies, fixed operators provide the majority of home and enterprise broadband services. In the U.S., cable companies serve more than 60% of households. Owing to the historical mishmash of regional regulations, they have a virtual monopoly! That means the majority of these households don’t have a choice, even in urban areas. Affordable and reliable broadband connections are still a dream in rural, low-income and hard-to-reach areas such as mountainous regions or pockets of low population densities.

Challenges Of Wired Broadband

For new players looking to provide fixed broadband, the biggest issues with wired broadband are the exorbitant costs involved and long timelines. To address the needs of today’s households, as well as small and medium enterprises, which should have 100s of Mbps speeds, fiber is the only future-proof solution for these new players.

Laying the fiber everywhere, however, is very expensive, and it takes years to get regulatory clearances, lay the cables, etc. Areas that don’t have the population densities or the revenue potential will probably never see fiber. Additionally, when you look at countries and regions such as India and Africa, where there is minimal wireline infrastructure, it is almost impossible to rely on wired solutions to bring high-speed broadband to the masses.

Wireless has been heralded as the most cost-effective and fastest solution to provide connectivity. It proved itself by increasing phone penetration in regions such as Africa almost overnight by using cellular technology. So, fixed wireless is not a new revolutionary idea. I remember deploying 2G-based fixed wireless terminals as early as the 1990s. Then why wait for 5G? Why was it not possible with 4G?

Simple answer: spectrum.

The Stars Are Aligning For 5G FWA

Data traffic increased exponentially with 4G. Operators were always gasping for more spectrum to support the demand for data. In such a situation, it was impossible and financially unwise for operators to use their precious spectrum for fixed wireless than for high revenue earning mobile broadband services.

With 5G, the spectrum situation is far different. Thanks to the lessons regulators learned with 4G, they made considerable amounts of spectrum available for 5G. Also, with new innovations, now the millimeter wave (mmWave) bands are usable for cellular wireless broadband services. According to some estimates I’ve seen, there is up to 2 GHz of globally harmonized virgin spectrum available in these bands. Combined with the traditional bands known as sub-6 GHz, there is potentially 10 to 40 times more spectrum than what is available for 4G today.

Deploying 5G has become a race, and operators across the globe are doing so at an unprecedented pace. Although they are primarily deploying their networks for mobile, they can easily offer fixed broadband services, without large incremental investments.

Unlike in 4G, where FWA was an afterthought, 5G players such as Qualcomm and Huawei are actively developing solutions to accelerate FWA. For example, Qualcomm, a client of mine, recently announced an extended range antenna module designed specifically for FWA that improves coverage and makes rural deployments economically viable.

And with the widening broadband access gap between urban and rural areas, governments around the world are getting ready to subsidize FWA deployments.

FWA Fits Squarely Into Operators 5G plans

Depending on the operators’ deployment strategy, there are many advantages to offering FWA services using 5G. For example, supporting mobility requires a large number of sites for ubiquitous coverage, which take many months to build. Instead of waiting for all the sites to come on air to launch mobile services, operators could start with FWA services when a cluster of sites are lit up and start earning revenue right away. Eventually, they could offer converged fixed and mobile services, with attractive bundled plans.

On the flip side, when operators deploy a cluster of sites for FWA, especially in rural areas, they might add a few more to provide limited mobility coverage. This way, 5G services could reach these areas around the same time as urban areas.

While sub-6 GHz bands are the basic staple, mmWave bands come in handy for FWA. These bands provide pockets of coverage, which means operators can target their deployments and marketing with pinpoint accuracy. For example, a mmWave site located at one end of a street, a city block or a small rural neighborhood, can cover 200-300 feet around it, and service can be advertised only for that area.

Unlike cable providers that need an expensive tech visit for onboarding a new customer, FWA can offer a self-install option, which dramatically reduces costs and speeds up deployment. That, combined with the less-expensive mmWave spectrum, allows 5G FWA providers to offer very competitive plans.

Large-Scale FWA Deployments Are Already Underway

FWA using 5G is not just a pipe dream, but a commercial reality. According to data collected by the Global mobile Suppliers Association (GSA), as of October 2019, 27 operators had already launched FWA services. These include major players such as BT Group (formerly British Telecom), Verizon, T-Mobile and others. There are more than 50 FWA devices in the market, made by many well-known original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), as well as many new OEMs that are drawn to this exciting opportunity.

Then the question arises: What does all this mean for marketers? Well, the 5G FWA transformation, along with the already prevalent “cord-cutting” trend, will open up new avenues for marketers, and they should be ready to make the best of these new opportunities. Additionally, mmWave, with its localized coverage, will allow marketers to hyper-target their audience and content.

So, to summarize, it seems like the time for 5G FWA has finally arrived, providing more broadband options for urbanites and glimmers of hope for rural folks.

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