The marketing from the wireless companies has the whole country buzzing with speculation that the whole world is going to go wireless with the introduction of 5G. There is a good chance that within five years that a good and reliable and pole-mounted technology could become the preferred way to go from the curb to homes and businesses. When that happens we will finally have wireless fiber-to-the-curb – something that I’ve heard talked about for at least 25 years.

I remember visiting an engineer in the horse country of northern Virginia in the 1990s who had developed a fiber-to-the-curb wireless technology that could deliver more than 100 Mbps from a pole to a house. His technology was limited in that there had to be one pole-mounted transmitter per customer, and there was a distance limitation of a few hundred feet for the delivery. But he was clearly on the right track and was twenty years ahead of his time. At that time we were all happy with our 1 Mbps DSL and 100 Mbps sounded like science fiction. But I saw his unit functioning at his home, and if he had caught the attention of a big vendor we might have had wireless fiber-to-the-curb a lot sooner than now.

I have to laugh when I read people talking about our wireless future, because it’s clear that this technology is going to require a lot of fiber. There is a lot of legislative and lobbying work going on to make it easier to mount wireless units on poles and streetlights, but I don’t see the same attention being put into making it easier to build fiber – and without fiber this technology is not going to work as promised.

It’s easy to predict that there are going to be a lot of lousy 5G deployments. ISPs are going to come to a town, connect to a single gigabit fiber and then serve the rest of the town from that one connection. This will be the cheap way to deploy this technology and those without capital are going to take this path. The wireless units throughout the town will be fed with wireless backhaul, with many of them on multiple wireless hops from the source. In this kind of network the speeds will be nowhere near the gigabit capacity of the technology, the latency will be high and the network will bog down in the evenings like any over-subscribed network. A 5G network deployed in this manner will not be a killer app that will kill cable networks.

However, a 5G fiber-to-the-curb network built the right way is going to be as powerful as an all-fiber network. That’s going to mean having neighborhood wireless transmitters to serve a limited number of customers, with each transmitter fed by fiber. When Verizon and AT&T talk about the potential for gigabit 5G this is what they are talking about. But they are not this explicit because they are not likely today to deploy networks this densely. The big ISPs still believe that people don’t really need fast broadband. They will market this new technology by stressing that it’s 5G while building networks that will deliver far less than a gigabit.

There are ISPs who will wait for this technology to mature before switching to it, and they will build networks the right way. In a network with fiber everywhere this technology makes huge sense. One of the problems with a FTTH network that doesn’t get talked about a lot is abandoned drops. Fiber ISPs build drops to homes and over time a substantial number of premises no longer use the network for various reasons. I know of some 10-year old networks where as many as 10% of fiber drops have been abandoned as homes that buy service from somebody else. A fiber-to-the-curb network solves this problem by only serving those who have active service.

I also predict that the big ISPs will make every effort to make this a customer-provisioned technology. They will mail customers a receiver kit to save on a truck roll, because saving money is more important to them than quality. This will work for many customers, but others will stick the receiver in the wrong place and never get the speed they might have gotten if the receiver was mounted somewhere else in the home.

There really are no terrible broadband technologies, but there are plenty of terrible deployments. Consider that there are huge number of rural customers being connected to fixed wireless networks. When those networks are deployed properly – meaning customers are not too far from the transmitter and each tower has a fiber feed – the speeds can be great. I know a colleague who is 4-miles from a wireless tower and is getting nearly 70 Mbps download. But there are also a lot of under-capitalized ISPs that are delivering speeds of 5 Mbps or even far less using the same technology. They can’t afford to get fiber to towers and instead use multiple wireless hops to get to neighborhood transmitters. This is a direct analogue of what we’ll see in poorly deployed 5G networks.

I think it’s time that we stop using the term 5G as a shortcut for meaning gigabit networks. 5G is going to vary widely depending upon the frequencies used and will vary even more widely depending on how the ISP builds their network. There will be awesome 5G deployments, but also a lot of so-so and even lousy ones. I know I will be advising my clients on building wireless fiber-to-the-curb – and that means networks that still need a lot of fiber.