The demand for broadband services with higher bandwidth is increasing thanks to the rapid growth of the Internet, social networks and streaming services, mainly due to the increase in the number of broadband users in homes and of their tendency to avoid the use of cables to connect. In urban, suburban, and even rural areas, over-the-top (OTT) video services continue to proliferate, online games, and services for streaming video and audio content with higher resolution to cover the consumer demand. According to the latest Cisco VNI forecasts, total Internet video traffic is estimated to grow to 82% of all Internet traffic by 2022 (2016: 67%). But only 44% of broadband connections worldwide exceed 50 Mbps. A recent report from FCC Internet Access Services indicates that 33,5 million US households still have a fixed-line connection with a download speed less than 25 Mbps, mainly because they are based on an old infrastructure of copper cables. Fixed broadband networks using copper, cable or fiber are often preferred for delivering broadband services.
The cost and complexity required to upgrade or expand fixed lines has become an ongoing challenge for deployment as their payback period exceeds 10 years. Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) takes advantage of the wireless medium to provide last-mile broadband connections through access points (APs) installed on top of buildings or furniture existing urban area, and offers the fundamental advantage of shortening the time to market and reducing the complexity and cost of the installation. To meet the growing demand for greater bandwidth from consumers, FWA has become a very attractive option for operators to expand their broadband networks with value-added services.
The FWA business for operators
While FWA has traditionally focused on underserved or unserved rural areas where it is not cost-effective to install fixed lines, the advancement of FWA technology, network equipment, and spectrum availability (unlicensed bands, citizen broadband radio and millimeter wave) also open up new market opportunities within urban and suburban areas, making FWA a favorable alternative to traditional fixed line fiber to the home options. , FTTH), cable or DSL (digital subscriber line), capable of offering speeds equivalent to those of fiber and lower prices in different regions. The competitive advantage of the FWA is that it creates new business opportunities for operators, as well as new revenue based on the operator's business profile. A mobile operator can enhance its competitive offer with a fixed broadband that complements the existing mobile service. A fixed-line broadband operator can deploy FWA as a complement to fiber in dense urban areas where there is no fast, cost-effective way to deploy fiber or upgrade DSL. In addition to faster deployment and lower cost, the availability of unlicensed and mmWave bands allows operators to take advantage of FWAs to cover urban and rural areas. The FWA business model is especially attractive in dense urban markets where there is a single provider of high-speed broadband and/or low FTTH deployment, as is the case in parts of the US and Western Europe. Ambitious start-ups and Internet service providers such as Starry also plan to compete with major operators using fixed wireless technology. Internet companies, including Google and Facebook, have also invested in developing their own fixed wireless networks and technologies.
Figure 1. FWA market segments.
Wi-Fi based FWA technology
In the past, cellular technologies such as WiMax and 4G LTE have played an important role in the FWA network, but their commercial success has been limited due to problems such as the high cost of the equipment for the client and the insufficient capacity of the network in order to provide the expected service. Since there are no official standards for wireless access to fixed networks, operators adopt proprietary solutions from their providers, which incorporate various spectrum and interference mitigation technologies to achieve capacity goals and lower cost per bit. While 5G promises higher capacity and technical advances compared to 4G, mobile operators trying to leverage their 5G infrastructure for FWA will take a more prudent approach due to the potential increase in traffic that FWA causes. Excess mobile capacity will vary depending on each region and the evolution of mobile applications over time. Wi-Fi based solutions have also been widely used to implement FWA using the integrated circuits used in consumer applications.
Figure 2. Increased capacity with Wi-Fi 6-based FWA.
The new 802.11ax Wi-Fi standard, marketed as Wi-Fi 6, incorporates substantial improvements and its adoption has grown, allowing it to provide fiber optic speed and offer significant advances in network efficiency and capacity, as well as economies of scale thanks to the huge Wi-Fi ecosystem and its supply chain. This has allowed it to achieve a capacity equivalent to fiber and the possibility of providing speeds from 100 Mbps to more than 1 Gbps per user with a lower cost of equipment for the client, so that this technology is suitable for both dense urban areas and rural areas using millimeter wave bands and/or unlicensed bands. Here are some of the major improvements introduced by Wi-Fi 6:
- Increased capacity with 8x8 MIMO and 160MHz
The capacity for up to 8 simultaneous data streams in a 160 MHz channel bandwidth with a single Access Point (AP) has significantly increased capacity per sector over the previous generation of devices with lower order MIMO configurations. With 1024-QAM, each data stream is now capable of carrying more than 1 Gbps of data traffic. The combination of 8x8 MIMO and 1024-QAM boosts the total throughput of a single AP to nearly 10 Gbps, bringing it closer to FTTP. This means that a single sector of FWA with 8x8 MIMO and 1024-QAM can reach 200 Mbps per user with an oversubscription factor of 50:1.
- Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO)
MU-MIMO technology in Wi-Fi tries to increase the total capacity of the network by transmitting simultaneously for different users, effectively offering a higher speed per user. In addition, coordinated scheduling of upstream and downstream data traffic enables more efficient airtime allocation to avoid bottlenecks and inefficiencies previously encountered with contention-based wireless access. In this way, FWA can serve a greater number of computers and reduce the cost of deployment.
- License-free spectrum expansion
After the opening of 6 GHz spectrum for license-free use, first in the US, then in the EU and other regions, up to 1,2 GHz will be available for license-free use. This represents a major inflection point for the Wi-Fi industry as a whole in parallel with the rise of applications based on faster Wi-Fi connectivity speeds. FWA equipment manufacturers will be able to take advantage of mass-market ICs for deployment in the unlicensed 6 GHz bands early next year.
Towards universal access to high-speed broadband
With the demand for faster broadband access, the FWA will play an important role in making it happen. Wi-Fi based FWA technology is uniquely capable of providing a network with high levels of capacity and efficiency that can be deployed on a large scale. Next-generation Wi-Fi with 802.11be tries to take advantage of 802.11ax to provide bandwidth of 30 Gbps or higher. Thanks to advances in Wi-Fi technology and economies of scale, the FWA network will bring significant benefits in terms of performance and cost, as well as time to market, to operators seeking viable options to replace or complement your existing fixed line infrastructure.
