Tag: fiber-to-the-curb

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The Industry

What Happened to Verizon Fiber-to-the-Curb?

Back in 2018, Verizon got a lot of press for the release of a fiber-to-the-curb (FTTC) technology it called Verizon Home. The first big test market was Sacramento. The company built fiber along residential streets and used wireless loops to reach homes. At the time, Verizon touted speeds of 300 Mbps but said that it was shooting for gigabit speeds using millimeter-wave spectrum. Verizon tried to make this a self-installed product, and customers got instructions on how to place the receiver in different windows facing the street to find the best reception and speeds.

There were quotes from the time that Verizon intended to build fiber to pass 25 million homes by 2025 with the technology. But then the product went quiet. In 2020, the Verizon Home product reappeared, but it is a totally different product that uses cellular spectrum from cell towers to bring broadband. This is the product that the industry is categorizing as FWA (fixed wireless access). The company no longer quotes a target broadband speed and instead sayshttps://www.verizon.com/5g/home/ “Verizon 5G Home is reliable and fast to power your whole home with lots of devices connected. So all of your TVs, tablets, phones, gaming consoles and more run on the ultra-fast and reliable Verizon network.” In looking through some Ookla speed tests for the FWA product, it looks like download speeds are in the 100 – 150 Mbps range – but like any cellular product, the speed varies by household according to the distance between a customer and the transmitter and other local conditions.

The new cellular-based product has gone gangbusters, and Verizon had over one million customers on the product by the end of the third quarter of 2022, having sold 342,000 new customers in that quarter. The relaunch of the product was confusing because the company took the unusual step of using the same product name and website when it switched to the wireless product. It even kept the same prices.

But the two products are day and night different. Verizon’s original plan was to pass millions of homes with a broadband product that was fast enough to be a serious competitor to cable broadband. Even if the product never quite achieved gigabit speeds, it was going to be fast enough to be a lower-priced competitor to cable companies.

While the new Verizon Home product is selling quickly, the product is not close in capabilities to the FTTC product. Cellular bandwidth is never going to be as reliable as a landline technology or one where fiber is as close as the curb. Verizon (and T-Mobile) have both made it clear that the FWA customers will take second priority for bandwidth availability behind cell phone customers. I don’t know that these companies could do it any other way – they can’t jeopardize unhappiness from a hundred million cellular customers to serve a much smaller number of FWA customers.

I think everybody understands the way that cellular broadband capabilities change during the day. We all see it as the bars of 4G or 5G at our homes bounce up and down based on a variety of factors such as weather, temperature, and the general network usage in the immediate neighborhood. The most interesting thing about being a broadband customer on a cellular network is that the experience is unique to every customer. The reception will vary according to the distance from the cell tower or small cell and the amount of clutter and interference in a given neighborhood from foliage and other buildings.

I expect that large bandwidth users will get frustrated with the variability of the signal and eventually go back to a landline technology. The FWA product is mostly aimed at bringing broadband to rural customers who have no better broadband alternative or to folks in towns for whom saving money is more important than performance. There are a lot of such people who have stuck with DSL for years rather than upgrading to the more expensive cable broadband, and these are the likely target for FWA. In fact, FWA might finally let the telcos turn off DSL networks.

Verizon says it’s still on track with what it calls the One Fiber initiative which is aimed at building Verizon-owned fiber to cell towers and small cell sites. This backbone was likely the planned starting point for neighborhood fiber, but now this is mostly a cost-cutting step to stop paying fiber leases.

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The Industry

Verizon Restarts Wireless Gigabit Broadband Roll-out

After a two-year pause, Verizon has launched a new version of its fixed wireless access (FWA) broadband, launching the service in Detroit. Two years ago, the company launched a trial version of the product in Sacramento and a few other cities and then went quiet about the product. The company is still touting this as a 5G product, but it’s not and using millimeter wave radios to replace the fiber drop in a fiber network. For some reason, Verizon is not touting this as fiber-to-the-curb, meaning the marketing folks at the company are electing to stress 5G rather than the fiber aspect of the technology.

Verizon has obviously been doing research and development work and the new wireless product looks and works differently than the first-generation product. The first product involved mounting an antenna on the outside of the home and then drilling a hole for fiber to enter the home. The new product has a receiver mounted inside a window that faces the street. This receiver connects wirelessly with a home router that looks a lot like an Amazon Echo which comes enabled with Alexa. Verizon is touting that the new product can be self-installed, as is demonstrated on the Verizon web page for the product.

Verizon says the FWA service delivers speeds up to a gigabit. Unlike with fiber, that speed is not guaranteed and is going to vary by home depending upon issues like distance from the transmitter, foliage, and other local issues. Verizon is still pricing this the same as two years ago – $50 per month for customers who buy Verizon wireless products and $70 per month for those who don’t. It doesn’t look like there are any additional or hidden fees, which is part of the new billing philosophy that Verizon announced in late 2019.

The new product eliminates one of the controversial aspects of the first-generation product. Verizon was asking customers to sign an agreement that they could not remove the external antenna even if they dropped the Verizon service. The company was using external antennas to bounce signals to reach additional homes that might have been out of sight of the transmitters on poles. With units mounted inside of homes that kind of secondary transmission path is not going to be possible. This should mean that the network won’t reach out to as many homes.

Verizon is using introductory pricing to push the product. Right now, the web is offering three months of free service. This also comes with a year of Disney+ for free, Stream TV for free, and a month of YouTube TV for free.

The router connects to everything in the home wirelessly. The wireless router comes with WiFi 6, which is not much of a selling point yet since there are practically no devices in homes that can yet use the new standard – but over time this will become the standard WiFi deployment. Customers can buy additional WiFi extenders for $200 if needed. It’s hard to tell from the pictures if the router unit has an Ethernet jack.

From a network perspective, this product still requires Verizon to build fiber in neighborhoods and install pole-mounted transmitters to beam the signal into homes. The wireless path to the home is going to require a good line-of-sight, but a customer only needs to find one window where this will work.

From a cost perspective, it’s hard to see how this network will cost less than a standard fiber-to-the-home network. Fiber is required on the street and then a series of transmitters must be installed on poles. For the long run operations of the network, it seems likely that the pole-mounted and home units will have to be periodically replaced, meaning perhaps a higher long-term operational cost than FTTH.

Interestingly, Verizon is not mentioning upload speeds. The pandemic has taught a lot of homes how important upload speeds are, Upload speed is currently one of the biggest vulnerabilities of cable broadband and I’m surprised to not see Verizon capitalize on this advantage for the product – that’s probably coming later.

Verizon says they still intend to use the technology to pass 30 million homes – the same goal they announced two years ago. Assuming they succeed, they will put a lot of pressure on the cable companies – particularly with pricing. The gigabit-range broadband products from Comcast and Charter cost $100 or more while the Verizon FWA product rivals the prices of the basic broadband products from the cable companies.

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Technology The Industry

Millimeter Wave 5G is Fiber-to-the-Curb

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.

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Technology

5G is Fiber-to-the-Curb

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.

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Technology

Is our Future Mobile Wireless?

I had a conversation last week with somebody who firmly believes that our broadband future is going to be 100% mobile wireless. He works for a big national software company that you would recognize and he says the company believes that the future of broadband will be wireless and they are migrating all of their software applications to work on cellphones. If you have been reading my blog you know I take almost the opposite view, but there are strong proponents of a wireless future, and it’s a topic worth continually revisiting.

Certainly we are doing more and more things by cellphone. But I think those that view future broadband as mobile are concentrating on faster mobile data speeds but are ignoring the underlying overall data capacity of cellular networks. I still think that our future is going to become even more reliant on fiber in order to handle the big volumes of bandwidth we will all need. This doesn’t mean that I don’t love cellphone data – but I think it’s a complement for landline broadband and not an equivalent substitute. Cellphone networks have major limitations and they are not going to be able to keep up with our need for bandwidth capacity. Even today the vast majority of cellphone data is handed off to landline networks through WiFi. And in my mind that just makes a cellphone into another terminal on your landline network.

Almost everybody understands the difference in quality between using your cellphone in your home using WiFi versus doing the same tasks using only the cellular network. I largely use my cellphone for reading news articles. And while this is a lot lighter application than watching video, I find that I usually have problems opening articles on the web when I’m out of the house. Today’s 4G speeds are still pretty poor and the national average download speed is reported to be just over 7 Mbps.

I think all of the folks who think cellphones are the future are counting on 5G to make a huge difference. But as I’ve written many times, it will be at least a decade before we see a mature 5G cellular network – and even then the speeds are not likely to be hugely faster than the 4G specification today. 5G is really intended to increase the stability of broadband connections (less dropped calls) and the number of connections (able to connect to a lot of IoT devices). The 5G specifications are not even shooting for at a huge speed increase, with the specification calling for 100 Mbps download cellular speeds, which translates into an average of perhaps 50 Mbps connections for all of the customers within a cell site. Interestingly, that’s the same target speed of the 4G specification.

And those greater future speeds sounds great. Since a cellphone connection by definition is for one user, a faster speed means that a cellular connection will support a 4K video stream eventually. But what this argument ignores is that a home a decade from now is going to be packed with devices wanting to make simultaneous connections to the Internet. It is the accumulated volume of usage from all of those devices that is going to add up to huge broadband demand for homes.

Already today homes are packed with broadband hungry devices. We have smart TVs, cellphones, laptops, desktops and tablets all wanting to connect to the network. We have other bandwidth hungry applications like gaming boxes and surveillance cameras. More and more of us are cutting the cord and watching video online. And then there are going to piles of new devices with smaller broadband demands, but which in total will add up to significant bandwidth. Further, a lot of applications we use are now in the cloud. My home uses a lot of bandwidth every day just backing up my data files, connecting to software in the cloud, making VoIP calls, and automatically updating software and apps.

I’ve touted a statistic many times that you might be tired of hearing, but I think it’s at the heart of the matter. The amount of bandwidth used by homes has been doubling every three years since 1980, and there is no end in sight to that trend. Already today a 4G connection is inadequate to support the average home. If you don’t think that’s true, talk to the homes now using AT&T’s fixed LTE connections that deliver 10 Mbps. That kind of speed is not adequate today to provide enough bandwidth to use the many broadband services I discussed above. Cellular connections are already too slow today to provide a reasonable home broadband, even as AT&T is planning to foist these connections on millions of rural homes.

There is no reason to think that 5G will be able top satisfy the total broadband needs of a home. The only way it might do that is if we end up in a world where we have to buy a small cellular subscription for every device in our home – I know I would prefer to instead connect all of my devices to WiFi to avoid such fees. Yes, 5G will be faster, but a dozen years from now when 5G is finally a mature cellular technology, homes will need a lot more bandwidth and a 5G connections then will feel just as inadequate then as 4G feels today.

Unless we get to a future point where the electronics get so cheap that there will be a ‘cell site’ for every few homes, then it’s hard to figure that cellular can ever be a true substitute for landline broadband. And even if such a technology develops you still have to ask if it would make any sense to deploy. Those small cell sites are largely going to have to be fiber fed to deliver the needed bandwidth and backhaul. And in that case small cell sites might not be any cheaper than fiber directly to the premise, especially when considering the lifecycle costs of the cell site electronics. Even if we end up with that kind of network – it’s would not really be a cellular network as much as it would be using wireless loops as the last few feet of a landline network – something that for years we have called fiber-to-the-curb. Such a network would still require us to build fiber almost everywhere.

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