The USA’s cable operators, as we pointed out in the lead article, can be threatened by telcos’ expansion of fixed wireless access (FWA), but may also leverage shared spectrum to deploy FWA themselves, to expand their footprint in rural areas and reduce their total cost of ownership across multiple access networks. This prospect is sufficiently interesting commercially to have attracted CableLabs, the US cable industry’s R&D and standards arm, to devise a new set of specifications called FARMSIS. This aims to extend infrastructure supporting DOCSIS, the cable access network standard, to support FWA too and so address rural users. FARMSIS (full title Fixed Wireless for Rural Broadband PHY Specification) sets out physical layer (PHY) specs that can be…