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Nokia has been helping both WISPs, as well as the big carriers T-Mobile and US Cellular, with their FWA equipment needs
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Massive MIMO radios used for FWA can reach up to 10 miles
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Even WISPs are now interested in Massive MIMO for FWA
When the big wireless operators Verizon and T-Mobile started offering fixed wireless access (FWA), we had to think of FWA in two different ways.
On the one hand, Verizon and T-Mobile began tapping excess LTE capacity of their mobile networks. So, they didn’t need that much special equipment — just something at the customer premise to pick up the radio signal from one of their towers.
On the other hand, wireless internet service providers (WISPs) had been offering FWA for quite some time. This required the WISPs to install a radio transmitter on some vertical infrastructure in a locality, and then they usually needed customer premise equipment mounted on the outside of homes and businesses to receive the FWA signal.
Last week at the Connect(X) conference in Atlanta, Jayasheel Shetty, head of Solutions for Mobile Networks at Nokia, said the Finnish vendor has been helping both WISPs as well as the big carriers T-Mobile and US Cellular with their FWA equipment needs.
Shetty said Nokia has been working with WISPs on LTE fixed wireless, with CBRS as the main driver, for the past several years. “We have a 4T4R radio along with a compact BBU for medium use cases,” he said.
But he said when T-Mobile launched 5G FWA, those environments often require massive MIMO high density radios of 64T64R.
“What’s happening with T-Mobile is they are deploying massive MIMO radios by default,” said Shetty. “It has better reach and capacity. With massive MIMO the range can go 10 miles or more.”
Now, more rural WISPs are interested in massive MIMO solutions. That’s because of the requirement within the Broadband Equity, Access and Deployment (BEAD) program that service providers must deliver 100/20 Mbps.
Shetty said the big wireless carriers are seeing close to 100 users per sector. This level of uptake has driven WISPs to look into 5G so that they, too, can garner more subscribers.
WISPs are still a bit hamstrung because CBRS spectrum has limits on power usage. But Shetty said that by using 5G massive MIMO radios, their coverage can reach up to 4 miles.
TD Cowen
Some analysts from TD Cowen also attended Connect(X) last week and spoke with Nokia.
They published a research note, saying that FWA site capacity could double for the big wireless operators. “Specifically, Nokia has noted that a tower can typically handle 80 users on a 100 MHz swath of spectrum or deliver 200 GB of data per site per hour,” wrote Cowen. “Nokia has a goal of achieving 400 GB per cell per hour by next year, essentially doubling the FWA capacity at a tower.”
Nokia and its FWA competitor Samsung predict they will be able to achieve even greater capacity by leveraging a few engineering solutions including:
- Multi-use MIMO, which allows for 16 “layers” of data transmission from 4 layers today. This will drive about 60% of the efficiencies.
- Beamforming and site optimization. Essentially improved directional radio/antenna and a more focused beam to the end-user. This should drive about 15% of the efficiencies.
- Improved CPE, which will have 8 receivers instead of 4 today. This will drive 15-20% of the efficiencies.
Cowen wrote, “These aforementioned solutions are important because it means the carriers can upgrade FWA capacity for cheap (no new tower hardware is needed). For context, there has been a longstanding narrative that wireless carriers will eventually run out of FWA capacity, and these eventual capacity limitations would provide much needed relief for cable, who are currently losing notable share to FWA carriers.”
But the FWA upgrades could dash cable’s hopes and meaningfully increase the total addressable market for the wireless carriers.
