OPTIMIZE YOUR FWA NETWORK EXPERIENCE AND MAXIMIZE PROFITABILITY
Matching market potential to the reality The primary challenge with FWA is to ensure a stable connection with good throughput and low latency. To achieve higher throughputs and good site capacity, so multiple users can be served, it makes sense to use the higher frequency bands for FWA. However, the economics of deploying FWA in high-band spectrum are particularly sensitive to overall traffic demand, mmWave propagation performance and the share of downlink and uplink in total traffic at the peak hour demand. 12 The high frequencies of mmWave spectrum can support massive bandwidths for eMBB use cases and high-capacity sites – but the tiny wavelengths of these frequencies suffer a lot of attenuation from obstacles. It could be the high-rise office block or apartments, or something as seemingly innocuous as trees coming into leaf – they can and will all have a measurable impact on not just the performance of your network, but also your ability to maximize the profitability of it. High-band mmWave spectrum means denser coverage and more capacity, but the need to be relatively close to the base station and clear line of sight (LoS) from the CPE antenna back to the base station can impact the end customer experience and ultimately ability to monetize the service. Mid-band 5G spectrum can enable a more rapid FWA network roll-out (in the US for example, about 80% of Verizon’s consumer FWA subscriber gross ads were in the operator’s C-band markets. 13 ) but potentially limit the ability to monetize new services which require, for example, ultra-reliable, low-latency communications (URLLC).
For Fixed Wireless Access (FWA) use cases, where a stable connection between the customer premises equipment (CPE) and the cell site is vital, it means it is critical to understand not just the market potential of the FWA service, but also the practicalities of designing, deploying and operating the network.
12. GSMA Intelligence , The Economics of mmWave 5G (January 2021) p.14 13. Jeff Baumgartner , “Verizon’s FWA base crosses 3M mark” (Light Reading: 23 January 2024)
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