As a key part of its focus on rebuilding America’s infrastructure, the Biden administration is aiming to accelerate closing the country’s persistent digital divide. The FCC’s current $9.2 billion Rural Development Opportunity Fund is being significantly augmented by up to $100 billion in additional funding as part of the Save America Act and Build Back Better legislation. This massive capital infusion should accelerate efforts to achieve broader availability of fast, affordable internet access in a country that desperately needs it.
There are four commonly understood issues in America’s broadband scene that affect neighborhoods all over the country. First, the majority of households for whom adequate speeds (currently defined as 100+ Mbps) are available have only one service provider option to choose from. It’s no surprise, given these common local monopolies, that US broadband pricing is among the highest in the developed world. This leads to problem #2: among lower-income families, affordability is a larger issue than availability, and many simply can’t squeeze $70 to $100 per month for broadband into tight family budgets. Third, the only available option for 30% of US households remains service over old DSL lines in the 10-20 Mbps range, which can’t support current household needs. Finally, while estimates on this vary, ~10% of US households still have no fixed access options at all.
Given the scope, scale, and urgency of this problem - in today’s world of continued remote work, education, and health care - service providers need an access network toolbox that gives them the ability to deploy new or upgrade existing outside plant to achieve both high capacity and long reach, on short timelines, with viable network economics across a wide range of household density.
Optical fiber networks are certainly the preferred tool for high-density markets, delivering an attractive combination of high capacity and low latency. Last-mile fiber deployment does involve longer timelines and higher costs in the medium- and low-density markets that include the majority of US households, where the pursuit of faster progress on the divide leads to consideration of the relative ease of wireless network deployment. Unfortunately, to date wireless options have not shown the ability to scale broadly in fixed access. Mobile networks (4G and 5G) require expensive licensed spectrum that yields unacceptable payback on high household access service capacity consumption per ARPU dollar relative to mobile usage and plans. Legacy fixed wireless access (FWA) networks based on re-purposed Wi-Fi technology struggle with unlicensed-spectrum interference and physical obstructions, both pervasive in residential neighborhoods. Millimeter-wave solutions have similar show-stopper issues with obstructions. Finally, the new low-earth-orbit satellite networks now being deployed are uniquely suited to reaching very remote areas and oceans, but they will have nowhere near enough aggregate capacity to serve mainstream US markets at scale.
Fortunately, a new category of broadband solutions emerged in 2021, known as next-generation fixed wireless access (ngFWA), which is filling the wide gaps left open by the array of options noted above. Designed specifically to meet the goal of delivering fiber-class throughput and low latency with the ease and much shorter deployment timelines of macro-scale wireless deployment models, ngFWA architectures capitalize on two fundamental advances in the state of the art for outdoor wireless networks. The first involves much higher levels of real-time digital signal processing capacity enabled by a more balanced distribution of that capacity between base stations and customer premise equipment in a distributed massive MIMO design. This in turn enables the use of algorithms with higher-order complexity, yielding a number of benefits, including higher total spectral efficiency (as much as 3x typical mid-band 5G networks), higher service uniformity across and between cells, more forgiving CPE installation at the home, and more immunity to obstructions and moving objects in the radio environment.
The second significant architecture change essential to ngFWA networks is real-time cancellation of interference received from other networks in unlicensed spectrum. This supports licensed-like performance and enables competitive operators to overbuild at scale in mainstream markets for the first time — and DSL operators to dramatically accelerate service upgrades for their installed base - all in free spectrum.
From the start of 2021, when the first ngFWA products became available, broadband service providers quickly grew in numbers, currently estimated at more than 200 at the turn of the year who are now investigating, piloting, and deploying ngFWA networks. This operator activity spans the globe and their current subscriber bases are in hundreds to millions - including incumbents and new entrants, some from outside the telecom segment.
Based on this reimagined solution, we predict that in 2022 broadband policymakers and the industry at large will fully grasp the unique performance advantages of ngFWA networks and the new possibilities they create. These platforms will become understood as an essential complement to last-mile fiber in accelerating efforts to close the digital divide in the US and globally. Fixed broadband subscribers everywhere will quickly reap material benefits as a result, and US investments targeting universal broadband coverage will achieve their goals more quickly than previously expected.
