Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) will flourish in 5G networks and become a mainstream element in the cellular business model for the first time in some environments. It will be a primary driver of deployments for some markets and use cases, although it is not likely to become widespread across the board as its success depends on a range of factors such as fibre penetration and affordability, spectrum availability and regulatory attitude.
The sheer capacity envisaged for 5G – when it is fully optimized and when large amounts of midband and millimeter wave spectrum have been allocated to it – suggests that the distinction between fixed and mobile access will break down in future. Rather than needing to instal dedicated equipment and CPE, and carve out specific spectrum, for FWA, some operators expect their 5G networks to have sufficient bandwidth to support fixed and mobile applications from the same platform, with any necessary QoE control conducted via slicing.
So 5G FWA will begin to converge with mobile into a common offering serving all users whether stationary on a fixed device or on the move, as 5G evolves into a medium for generic broadband.
Over the next five years though, FWA is set to become a major revenue earner for many operators as a distinct category separate from mobile, delivering signals on a point to point or multipoint basis to access points (APs) on the ground or on buildings. WiFi will then kick in for the final distribution to user devices in homes, enterprises or public venues.
FWA was first deployed early in the 4G era as it became possible to match the performance and reliability of fixed wired broadband services provided over telco copper access networks via DSL, cable TV coaxial infrastructures, or fiber-to-the-home (FTTH). FWA then became a viable and attractive business proposition for fixed line services in situations where wired alternatives were either uneconomic or unavailable, or a combination of both.
This brought in a number of use cases starting with rural broadband where cellular was either the only broadband option apart from expensive satellite connectivity, or provided superior speeds to telco DSL at large distances from the nearest DSLAM, or fiber termination point in the street. Cable TV was rarely available in remote locations, while FTTH was uneconomical.
FWA then extended to some lightly populated suburban areas where cable TV was not necessarily available and DSL offered variable QoS depending on distance from the nearest termination point. There were also some situations where FWA competes directly with wired alternatives on the basis of price, sometimes benefiting from superior economics.
Depending on the situation and what the competition is offering, FWA itself will vary in the bit-rate it supports. This ranges from low tier in the low tens of Mbps in rural areas, to mid-tier between 50 and 100Mbps in suburban zones, to high tier between 100Mbps and 1Gbps in urban locations where FTTH may also be available.
As this suggests, FWA does not promise to end the digital divide but merely to enrich the choice and fill in coverage where it might not have been available. Under 5G, there will be scope to raise the ante against wired alternatives and compete more strongly over a greater number of use cases.
There are various factors in favor of 5G, including the purely technical increase in potential capacity and also increased availability of unlicensed spectrum creating opportunities for local players including municipalities, health agencies and educators, for access to remote teaching or telemedicine. There is also scope for FWA delivery to IoT devices combined with cloud-delivered core networks supporting edge offload.
Further ahead, after 2-3 years, higher mmWave frequencies will give 5G a further lift in this sector by stepping up capacity and performance, especially in low lying rural areas that have some inhabitants, as signal boosting devices such as repeaters extend the range of gigabit FWA.
5G faces other FWA competitors beyond the wired options, with Facebook’s Terragraph at last gaining some traction after five years’ gestation. Facebook set up pilot systems in several countries using prototype equipment during this time, and by 2020 had assembled a coherent ecosystem after Qualcomm had developed a low cost, high volume chipset based on the IEEE 802.ay standard to facilitate affordable deployment of Terragraph. This brought in various equipment makers such as Cambium Networks, Radwin and Siklu, to release products in 2020, with others following.
IEEE 802.11ay is a sequel to the IEEE 802.11ad, which in turn emerged as a future option for WiFi under the WiGig banner, operating in the mmWave V-band at 60 GHz but with very limited range of just a few meters and poor penetration through walls. 802.ay quadrupled the bandwidth and added up to eight streams of MIMO with support for channel bonding and extending range drastically to up to 500 meters with better penetration and theoretical transmission rate of 20-40Gbps.
While there is cautious optimism around Terragraph, doom and gloom has surrounded Google’s now aborted balloon-based Project Loon, which had been proposed as a means of establishing broadband service in remote areas. The idea of balloon-based FWA goes back at least to 2005 and hopes continued to rise after Project Loon was launched as an R&D project in 2011. The high watermark came around 2017 when Project Loon played a role in the response to Hurricane Maria, as the FCC granted the company a temporary licence to provide wireless service in Puerto Rico when it was devastated by that storm in September that year. This demonstrated one of the principal use cases for FWA in general, the ability to establish communications rapidly in response to an emergency, or over a somewhat longer scale for construction and engineering sites.
This led to Project Loon being spun out of Google’s Alphabet in 2018, but thereafter it deflated as it proved impossible to make it economically viable on any scale. The project was finally closed down in January 2021, with Loon CEO Alastair Westgarth citing inability to drive costs low enough to sustain a viable long-term business. An infrastructure comprising large high altitude balloons the size of tennis courts could not compete with wireless on the ground, although technically milestones were reached.
Some of it has lived on in a successor project called Taara, also backed by Alphabet in partnership with South African based telco Econet to provide Internet service across sub-Saharan Africa.
This dispenses with balloons but uses Loon’s free space optical technology for linking terminals on the ground at distances up to 20 kilometers and speeds up to 20Gbps. This technology had been developed for linking balloons at distances up to 100km apart in the stratosphere, where with barely any water vapor there is less signal attenuation and so longer range.
Line of sight is required so the terminals have to be located on masts or rooftops, making Taara best suited to relatively flat areas such as much of the southern African Veld. This highlights how investment even in projects that appear to have failed can reap dividends elsewhere.
Drones are the other candidate for FWA, under the acronym FANET (Future Flying Ad-Hoc Network). Like balloons, drones have been advocated for rapid communications deployment in disaster recovery situations, and are actually better suited because they are more cost effective for providing temporary links rapidly over a limited geographical area with low altitude cover. There are no signs of drones being deployed for large-scale coverage of the sort Project Loon was aiming at, or for that matter wireless on the ground as with Project Taara.
It is looking increasingly likely then that cellular and especially 5G will become the workhorse for FWA, with the other options being preferred mostly for providing temporary short term coverage, with a few exceptions such as Project Taara. We have already seen cellular deployed for FWA for wide-scale coverage in remote areas, a prime example being the Australian Outback, which accounts for a large proportion of the country’s surface area with sparse population but still a significant number of people in total.
Much of this area is quite flat and conducive for line of sight links, for which reason it will be favored with one of the first mmWave FWA deployments. The country’s nbn (National Broadband Network) has been working with, Qualcomm, Ericsson and US 5G equipment maker Casa Systems on stable 5G mmWave transmission at around 1Gbps over distances of 7km, which vies with Italy’s TIM as the highest range for mmWave achieved so far.
Italy is indeed another country looking at mmWave for FWA in sparse rural areas. It is clear that FWA a big future under 5G, but not evenly spread, becoming mainstream in some admittedly large niches and almost absent elsewhere. Over time, FWA will gradually disappear as a distinct category by merging with mobile, but live on much longer in those areas where it is really the only broadband option.