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Fiber, 5G and Public Utilities - It’s a Win-Win-Win

Fiber, 5G and Public Utilities - It’s a Win-Win-Win Image Credit: Clearfield

Today’s smart city communities are gearing up to offer advanced services throughout their coverage areas. These projects include smart lighting, smart buildings, video surveillance with closed circuit television for law enforcement, smart parking, and fully integrated real-time Internet of Things (IoT) connectivity. There are ample applications of communication technology enabling next generation business services, as cloud-based services continue to expand. The full realization of this trend will involve tens of thousands of sensors and devices that communicate at scale.

Two related technologies are laying the groundwork for these smart city projects - fiber optics and 5G. Cities that have already invested in fiber are ahead of the curve for 5G and smart city applications. But in locations with little fiber, it is likely there are little 5G plans and few smart city projects. The reason fiber plays such a critical role is that it has nearly limitless bandwidth capacity, it supports the lowest latency physical connections possible over a wide area, and it is more affordable than ever to deploy whether underground or aerially. The business case for fiber deployment truly works.

Funding

One of the things that the pandemic continues to bring attention to is the absolute necessity of having a reliable broadband connection. No other issue has gained as much bipartisan support in recent months as funding the buildout of broadband networks across the United States. Funding sources for building these networks have been announced by the FCC and Congress. The FCC’s big contribution is a 10-year program called the Rural Digital Opportunity Fund set at $20.4 billion. Also contained within the CARES Act passed earlier this year by Congress, money has been appropriated for building broadband networks by the end of 2020. These broadband connections must meet the minimum speeds of 25Mbps downstream and 3 Mbps upstream even though most networks being built today are designed for 1 Gigabit per second per connections.

The good news for public power utilities is that they can participate in bidding for this government funding. Local utilities are in a unique position to help their citizens obtain the best broadband connections possible. In fact, there has never been a better time to build broadband networks than right now.

Labor lite

The deployment techniques for connecting fiber have advanced in recent years to allow lower skilled technicians to both construct the fiber network and turn up the network for service. When connecting fiber optic lines, you have two choices - splicing or connectors. Splicing requires a trained technician to obtain the appropriate high-quality connection and very low loss (measured in dB). Using connectorized fiber optic lines can eliminate the need for using splicing on a low fiber count cable (from 1 to 24 fibers). This technique is called “plug-and-play”. The industry standard for insertion loss of a mated pair of fiber optic connectors is 0.4dB or less. Some advanced plug-and-play suppliers offer much better performance as low as 0.2dB insertion loss.

The push to roll out 5G may have been slowed in some way by the COVID crisis but the fact remains that citizens within the community will continue to demand ubiquitous high-speed broadband. The early days of deploying 5G are upon us. The technology is well designed. Some of the brightest minds in the world have figured out how to make the wireless spectrum satisfy this insatiable demand for bandwidth and at the same time, enable new services - taking advantage of these low-latency connections. The technology is solid. The vendor community has invested in making this work.

What local governments can do

Smart cities have an opportunity to leverage fiber investment at 5G small cell sites. Beyond the technology of 5G, let’s look at what is happening within local jurisdictions. The FCC voted in 2018 to institute policies designed to streamline the deployment of 5G. These placed requirements on local municipalities to operate within a 60-day shot clock instead of the 180-day shot clock in processing permitting requests for small cell sites. They also imposed limited pole attachment fees and application fees associated with small cells. Many local governments pushed back on the idea of the federal government imposing these rules onto the local government. With these FCC regulations in place at the local level, there are still some levers for the local government to pull in expanding coverage to its citizens.

Local governments get to decide where to allow small cells (location). They can also dictate the type of structure in which they allow antennas and radios to be mounted. These decisions can fall under local zoning rules common to city governments. This is important because each mobile network operator (MNO) will want to have their own fiber connected network of antennas and radios. The best scenario for local governments is to build a small cell site that enables multiple MNOs or carriers the physical space they need rather than have a single-carrier small cell site. This multi-carrier approach to small cell sites can support the aesthetic look desired by local governments and support all the MNOs in a single location. It’s a win-win. The bonus is that if you have three MNOs in one location all wanting to provide 5G, then you can bet all of them will require a fiber connection. Now that’s a win-win-win!

Author

Kevin is the CMO of Clearfield and joined the company in 2016. He serves on the Senior Council Committee of the Fiber Broadband Association and was a three-time elected Board Chair. Prior to joining Clearfield, he spent two at ADTRAN and a decade at BellSouth. Morgan received a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Auburn University and an MBA from the University of Alabama.

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