One of the biggest flaws in the recent RDOF reverse auction grant was allowing fixed wireless technology to claim the same gigabit technology tier as fiber. The FCC should never have allowed this to happen. While there is a wireless technology that can deliver up to a gigabit of speed to a few customers under specific circumstances, fiber can deliver gigabit speeds to every customer in a network. This is particularly true in a rural setting where the short reach of gigabit wireless at perhaps a quarter mile is a huge limiting factor for using the technology in a rural setting.

But rather than continue to fight this issue for grant programs there is a much easier solution. It’s now easy to buy residential fiber technology that can deliver 10-gigabits of speed. There have been active Ethernet lasers capable of 10-gigabit speeds for many years. In the last year, XGS-PON has finally come into a price range that makes it a good choice for a new passive fiber network – and the technology can deliver 10-gigabit download speeds.

The FCC can eliminate the question of technology equivalency by putting fiber overbuilders into a new 10-gigabit tier. This could give funding fiber the priority over all other technologies. Fixed wireless will likely never be capable of 10-gigabit speeds. Even if that ever is made possible decades from now, by then fiber will have moved on to the next faster generation. Manufacturers are already looking at 40-gigabit speeds for the next generation of PON technology.

Cable company hybrid-fiber coaxial networks are not capable today of 10-gigabit speeds. These networks could possibly deliver speeds of around 6 or 7 gigabits, but only by removing all of the television signals and delivering only broadband.

I don’t know why it was so hard for the FCC to say no to gigabit fixed wireless technology. When the industry lobbied to allow fixed wireless into the gigabit tier, all the FCC had to do was to ask to see a working demo of wireless gigabit speeds working in a rural farm environment where farms are far apart. The FCC should have insisted that the wireless industry demonstrates how every rural household in the typical RDOF area can receive gigabit speeds. They should have been made to show the technology overcomes distance and line-of-sight issues. There is no such demo because the wireless technology can’t do this – at least not without building fiber and establishing a base transmitter at each farm. The FCC really got suckered by slick PowerPoints and whitepapers when they should have instead asked to see the working demo.

Don’t get me wrong – I don’t hate the new wireless technologies. There are small towns and neighborhoods in rural county seats that could really benefit from the technology. The new meshed networks, if fed by fiber, can superfast bandwidth to small pockets of households and businesses. This can be a really attractive and competitive technology.

But this is not fiber. Every rural community in America knows they want fiber. They understand that once you put the wires in place that fiber is going to be providing solutions for many decades into the future. I think if fiber is built right that it’s a hundred-year investment. Nobody believes this to be true of fixed wireless. The radios are all going to be replaced many times over the next hundred years and communities worry about having an ISP who will make that continual reinvestment.

But since there is such an easy way to fix this going forward, these arguments about gigabit wireless can be largely moot. If the FCC creates a 10-gigabit tier for grants, then only fiber will qualify. The fixed wireless folks can occupy the gigabit tier and leave most other technologies like low-orbit satellite to some even lower tier. The FCC made a mistake with RDOF that they can’t repeat going forward – the agency declared that other technologies are functionally equivalent to fiber – and it’s just not true.