- Kwikbit offers fixed wireless service to manufactured home communities, where it can be difficult for providers to deploy fiber
- Roughly 66,000 MHCs exist in the country, said Kwikbit CEO Joe Costello
- Few FWA providers target that segment of the broadband market
People usually think of fixed wireless access (FWA) as another way to connect sparse rural areas. Startup Kwikbit however is geared towards a different, yet still very much underserved, market – manufactured home communities (MHCs).
They’re commonly referred to as mobile home parks, but Kwikbit CEO Joe Costello told Fierce that’s a bit of a misnomer: “99% of them are stuck in the ground forever, they’re not mobile.”
Founded in 2016, Kwikbit was originally part of a company that’s now known as Altowav, but later spun out as a separate entity to market internet service. Altowav, which remains a sister company, supplies Kwikbit with 60 GHz FWA gear.
The idea to connect MHCs didn’t happen right off the bat, Costello said. Kwikbit first eyed deploying fixed wireless to the usual rural markets as well as urban areas where “there’s tons of fiber but it doesn’t go to people’s houses.”
However, it anticipated major permitting headaches – a problem many operators are familiar with. And as a small company, Kwikbit didn’t have the skills or the time to deal with that process, he said.
Untapped potential
The lightning bolt came when a company advisor mentioned he had a friend who owns an MHC, where the internet is pretty “terrible.” Roughly 66,000 MHCs exist in the U.S., Costello said, and they are home to 20-25 million people. For context, that’s about the same amount of people who were enrolled in the government’s Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP).
Why are these communities so underserved? You guessed it, the problem lies in permits. Costello explained fiber providers already have to go through the hassle of obtaining approval for regular FTTH deployments, which can be a years-long endeavor.
But an MHC is private property, often owned by a single individual. “All the approvals don’t do any good,” Costello said. ISPs would have to get another permit to deploy to these communities that typically have fewer than 200 houses. At that point, a provider is likely to not bother.
Another challenge with deploying fiber to MHCs is they can be fairly old communities that don’t have maps of where the water pipes and gas lines are located. “It’s extremely costly and risky to do that digging,” he said.
While 60 GHz spectrum doesn’t do much for spread out areas like farmland, it’s “really good” for 300-400 meter ranges, Costello noted, which is ideal for MHCs since they are relatively dense communities.
Niche as the market may appear, Kwikbit isn’t the only player in the MHC game. AccessParks also provides broadband in that neck of the woods, including service to national parks, recreational vehicle (RV) parks and campgrounds. Broadband Enterprise provides wholesale bandwidth for MHCs as well as places like hotels and senior care facilities.
Wave7 Research Principal Jeff Moore said he’s not aware of many FWA providers that have chosen to market service to mobile homes.
“I think this is a solid choice,” Moore told Fierce, as MHCs are sometimes not served by neither fiber nor cable coax.
“While 60 GHz is not a frequency with good propagation characteristics for last-mile connectivity, it is fine for line-of-sight delivery to a receiver in the area, followed by fiber distribution for the last mile,” Moore said. “This can be a solid business model for delivering connectivity to underserved communities such as mobile home parks.”
This can be a solid business model for delivering connectivity to underserved communities such as mobile home parks.
Jeff Moore, Principal, Wave7 Research
Kwikbit is available across several states, and its biggest concentrations are in California and Texas, said Costello, followed by Arizona and Nevada. The company last year secured more than $800,000 in state funding from California to connect MHCs in the Los Angeles area.
Fixed wireless and satellite broadband could play a bigger role in the federal Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program, if the new administration opts to do away with BEAD’s fiber preference.
While Costello thinks fiber is a “fantastic” technology, underserved folks today don’t have the luxury of waiting 5-10 years for fiber to show up at their doorstep. Kwikbit offers symmetrical 1-gig speeds, which is “just as good as what you’re going to get from fiber.”
The U.S. right now has “a huge amount of pain” with the number of people who don’t have good enough internet. “You have to be less religious about these things and be much more practical,” he concluded.
