I’ve been thinking about and writing about 5G broadband using millimeter wave spectrum for over a year. This is the broadband product that Verizon launched in Sacramento and a few other markets as a trial last year. I don’t know why it never struck me that this technology is the newest permutation of fiber-to-the curb.

That’s an important distinction to make because naming it this way makes it clear to anybody hearing about the technology that the network is mostly fiber with wireless only for the last few hundred feet.

I remember seeing a trial of fiber-to-the-curb back in the very early 2000s. A guy from the horse country in Virginia had developed the technology of delivering broadband from the pole into the home using radios. He had a working demo of the technology at his rural home. Even then he was beaming fast speeds – his demo delivered an uncompressed video signal from curb to home. He knew that the radios could be made capable of a lot more speed, but in those days I’m sure he didn’t think about gigabit speeds.

The issues that stopped his idea from being practical have been a barrier until recently. There was first the issue of getting the needed spectrum. He wanted to use what we now call midrange spectrum, but which were considered as high spectrum bands in 2000 – he would have to convince the FCC to carve out a slice of spectrum for his application, something that’s always been difficult. He also didn’t have any practical way of getting the needed bandwidth to the pole. ISP’s were still selling T1s, 1 Mbps DSL, and 1 Mbps cable modem service, and while fiber existed, the electronics cost for terminating fiber to devices on multiple poles was astronomical. Finally, even then, this guy had a hard time explaining how it would be cheaper to use wireless to get to the home rather than building a drop wire.

Verizon press releases would make you think that they will be conquering the world with millimeter wave radios and deploying the technology everywhere. However, once you think of this as fiber-to-the-curb that business plan quickly makes no sense. The cost of a fiber-to-the-curb network is mostly in the fiber. Any saving from using millimeter wave radios only applies to the last few hundred feet. For this technology to be compelling the savings for the last hundred feed has to be significant. Do the radio electronics really cost less for wireless compared to the cost of fiber drops and fiber electronics?

Any such comparison must consider all the costs of each technology – meaning the cost of installations, repairs, maintenance, and periodic replacement of electronics. And the comparisons need to be honest. For example, every other wireless technology I know requires more maintenance truck roles than fiber-based technologies due to the squirrelly nature of how wireless behaves in the wild.

Even should the radios become much cheaper than fiber drops, the business case for the technology might still have no legs. There is no way to get around the underlying fact that fiber-to-the-curb means building fiber along residential streets. Verizon has always said that they didn’t extend their fiber FiOS network to neighborhoods where the construction costs were too high. Verizon still seems to be the most cautious of the big ISPs and it’s hard to think that they’ve changed this philosophy. Perhaps the Verizon business plan is to cherry pick in markets outside their footprint, but only where they have the low-cost option of overlashing fiber. If that’s their real business plan then they will not be conquering the world with 5G, but just cherry picking neighborhoods that meet their price profile – a much smaller footprint and business plan than most of the industry is expecting.

My hope is that the rest of the industry starts referring to this technology as fiber-to-the-curb instead of calling it 5G. The wireless companies have gained great advantage from using the 5G name for multiple technologies. They have constantly used the speeds from the fiber-to-the-curb trials and the hot spot trials to make the public think the future means gigabit cellular service. It’s time to start demystifying 5G and using a different name for the different technologies.

Once this is understood it ought to finally be clear that millimeter wave fiber-to-the-curb is not coming everywhere. This sounds incredibly expensive to build in neighborhoods with already-buried utilities. Where density is low it might turn out that fiber-to-the-curb is more expensive than fiber-to-the-home. The big cost advantage seems to come from hitting multiple homes from one pole transmitter. Over time, when anybody can buy the needed components of the technology the best business case will become apparent to us all – for now the whole industry is guessing about what Verizon is doing because we don’t understand the basic costs of the technology.

At the end of the day this is just another new technology to put into the quiver when designing last mile networks. There will undoubtably be places where fiber-to-the-curb has a cost advantage over fiber drops. Assuming that Verizon or somebody else builds enough of the technology to pull hardware prices down, I picture a decade from now that fiber overbuilds will consider fiber-to-the-curb as part of the mix in designing the last few hundred feet.