NETWORK PLANNING FOR FIXED WIRELESS ACCESS
What are the challenges with Fixed Wireless Access? The primary challenge with FWA is to ensure a stable connection and good throughput. 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. This means users need to be relatively close to the base station and line of sight (LoS) from the customer premises equipment (CPE) antenna back to the base station is strongly recommended. The other main challenge with FWA, especially for an existing mobile network operator, is that FWA subscribers consume significantly more data than a regular mobile subscriber. According to the latest Ericsson Mobility report , the average mobile subscriber in North America consumes 26GB of data per month while the average for an FWA subscriber is 324GB, over 12x higher! This means every new FWA subscriber added to the network has a significant effect and care needs to be taken when signing up FWA subscribers to ensure the network can handle the demand and other subscribers are not adversely affected.
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