Verizon, Google Tap Fixed Wireless for Last Mile in Dense Urban Areas
Fiber broadband ISPs are eyeing fixed wireless to reduce costs and speed deployments in dense urban areas where fiber exists, industry speakers said on a New America panel Tuesday. A Verizon representative said the company plans to use fixed wireless to support cities that already have Fios, and an Alphabet executive said subsidiary Google Fiber sees wireless as a way to quickly reach customers and get revenue. Panelists said spectrum sharing may be the quickest way to upgrade networks and promote wireless innovation.
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Verizon rolled out fiber-to-the-home in major urban areas, but “in cities, there are just a lot of difficult situations where you just may not be able to reach all of the potential customers,” said Vice President-Wireless Policy Development Charla Rath. The company plans to deploy a 28 GHz fixed wireless service to reach customers in areas that already have Fios -- in addition to places that don’t, she said. New York City and Philadelphia this year questioned the telco's faithfulness to franchise agreement terms on reaching customers with Fios (see 1609140058). Philadelphia said it resolved the dispute in October.
Fiber deployments at first are more cost effective in cities than rural areas, but the urban price tag can spike as density increases, said Alphabet Vice President-Access Services Milo Medin. Cities like New York, Chicago and San Francisco are “very complicated environments” because fiber must be built completely underground and there’s no common duct space, he said. Google Fiber recently announced it would scale back fiber builds while exploring wireless technologies (see 1610260034) and bought last-mile gigabit wireless company Webpass (see 1610030035).
The internet company sees wireless as a way to reach more homes quickly, Medin said. “There are places where if you can make the economics of fiber cheap enough, you will always build fiber to the home … but that takes time and capex to deliver,” he said. “Part of the appeal of wireless is there are certain areas where the economics for fiber don’t work but would work for wireless.” In other areas, the cost of fiber might not be high but wireless will reach customers faster, he said. “To the extent that you can use wireless as an extension of [fiber], you will be able to build faster, deliver services to users quicker and get to revenue faster.”
Fiber still costs less in the long run, if “amortized over enough time and enough people,” said Facebook Public Policy Director Alan Norman. Reaching customers more quickly with wireless can provide “huge competitive advantages,” he said. The “sweet spot” for millimeter wave networks is in dense urban areas, said Siklu Director-Business Development Boris Maysel. Siklu works with Santa Cruz and other municipalities to deploy millimeter wave radios extending the reach of fiber (see 1604150023). “The fiber is there but it’s not dense enough to get to all" the small and medium-size businesses and multi-dwelling units, he said.
Sharing may be the quickest way to make more spectrum available to commercial providers, panelists said. The goal is to make spectrum “abundant and unconstrained,” Medin said. Trying to clear out incumbent users from a given band could take a decade, he said. All spectrum is spoken for already, he said. “Changing the allocation is a long, complex political process, not primarily an engineering process.”
Spectrum sharing encourages innovative new entrants to work in the bands, said Starry Senior Vice President-Communications Virginia Lam Abrams. Starry is a startup from Boston and New York providing fixed wireless last-mile services, with ex-Aereo CEO Chet Kanojia as its chief according to its website. “If you went with an exclusively licensed model, then that would foreclose opportunity for a lot of smaller players," she said.