Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) may not strictly be a primary 5G use case but it is certainly gaining traction almost as quickly, in certain markets, as more exotic broadband and IoT applications.
FWA was first seen as primarily a consumer play but increasingly operators are targeting enterprise opportunities, especially in the USA, where AT&T has just unveiled its 5G Fixed Wireless service for business. This includes various options, including plans at 50Mbps and 100Mbps, some running in low band spectrum under the 5G banner, and some offering high speed 5G+ in millimeter wave bands, in the far smaller number of locations where that is built out.
This dovetails with AT&T’s existing combination of fiber and mobile wireless broadband networks, which between them reach over 2.5 million business sites, although with no indication how many of those are actually customers. The new service uses fixed wireless routers from Sierra Wireless and also Cradlepoint, which Ericsson acquired for $1 billion in November 2020.
AT&T has been championing FWA for a while, having unveiled its plans in 2017 following involvement in the FCC’s Connect America Fund Phase II (CAF-II) program. Under this, AT&T, Verizon and eight other telcos shared a $1.5 billion pot awarded in 2015 to build out broadband in rural areas. AT&T launched FWA over LTE to meet its part of that bargain.
AT&T then quickly latched on to the idea that FWA also had a big potential role for businesses, in January 2019 making it one of its three pillars of enterprise 5G. The other two were mobility in all its guises, from peripatetic workers to IoT devices, and edge compute for low latency and more flexible routing or processing of data.
The initial enterprise focus has been on venues and high-traffic urban areas, much as it has for Verizon. The third national operator, T-Mobile, has rather missed the enterprise party so far with under 10% of that market, but is again targeting FWA as a key part of a strategy to prize some of that business away from AT&T and Verizon.
All three are trying to tap opportunities presented by the Covid-19 pandemic and associated lockdowns that have been more intensive in some US states than others. AT&T has been particularly keen to play this hand over its recent announcement, arguing that with the shift to working from home, 5G fixed wireless with the new routers can deliver a more secure connection separated from employees’ traditional fixed home broadband service.
“It is now almost a full year since the global pandemic accelerated remote work adoption by almost a decade – and throughout the rapid evolution of related business needs, AT&T has been there to enable continued success,” said Mo Katibeh, chief product and platform officer at AT&T Business.
One point of interest concerns deployment of 5G in mmWave bands, which with beamforming in areas where either line of sight, or near-line of sight, can be achieved, can offer high speeds and capacity. AT&T’s approach is to evaluate demand as the service unfolds and decide accordingly where and when to build out mmWave further.
Interest in FWA is also growing elsewhere in the world, even if the consumer market is attracting greater initial focus in many countries. Operators are already spotting opportunities for FWA beyond just filling in gaps in fixed broadband coverage, seeking to compete directly through lower cost or higher capacity packages.
Vodafone has also found that its Gigacube FWA service, launched in the UK in July 2019, can be stickier than its wired counterparts because consumers are more likely to retain it when they move house. With a wired service, a new connection needs to be set up and it may not be available in the new locations, as is often the case with cable TV for example. A mobile FWA service is less tied to an actual abode, even though it does work on a point-to-point basis, so that it is sometimes called ‘cable in the sky’.
Across Europe as a whole, operators are looking beyond the 7 million homes within the EU that currently lack any broadband connection, although that is an obvious first target. Of the EU’s 220 million households there is a larger number, perhaps another 15 million, that currently have a wired broadband connection but with such low bit-rates and poor reliability that it is not capable of sustaining the applications that many have to come to rely on during the pandemic, such as videoconferencing. In many cases it is more affordable, and faster, to deploy FWA than run an optical fiber into a village sufficiently close to inhabitants to enable fast broadband over DSL.
On the enterprise front, other advantages of FWA include rapid provisioning of temporary sites, a common requirement in engineering and construction. In many of these cases arranging adequate fixed line communications to support critical processes has traditionally been expensive and time consuming, incurring delays and sometimes being unreliable.