Tag Archives: Tarana

Urban WISPs

When Tarana released the new G2 generation of radios, one of the claims the company made was that the radios are powerful enough for ISPs to bring point-to-multipoint broadband to metropolitan areas.

The new specifications support the premise. The new G2 radio can support up to 512 customers in a sector (2,048 customers in total). Each sector can accept up to 6.4 Gbps of backhaul bandwidth. If all customers are provided with a gigabit product, the oversubscription ratio would be 20:1. That’s about double the ratio for current fiber technology, but many ISPs would find this to be acceptable. If a WISP were to install a Tarana radio on an existing tall urban tower, it should easily be able to see a lot more than 2,000 homes and businesses.

Selling fixed wireless in an urban area is an interesting marketing plan because there are a lot of locations that won’t be reachable from a single radio site. Rural areas have dead zones created for wireless technologies by hills and other impediments. In a city, the dead zones are more pronounced but localized. There is dead zone created behind every tall building. A home next to a taller neighbor might not be able to see a tower directly. This can be solved to some extent by using multiple towers, but tower real estate in many cities is hard to come by. Many towers are already loaded to capacity or are reserving any remaining capacity for the giant cell companies.

But a WISP could never serve everybody in an urban environment. There are nowhere near enough tall towers in a typical city or suburb to serve more than a relatively small percentage of households. A WISP marketing plan will shoot to fill all of the slots on a radio. However, there is a proceeding at the FCC that is considering overriding local restrictions on tower placement, which could be a huge boon to WISPs and cellular FWA providers.

This is an intriguing idea that would bring yet another competitive option to cities. There is already a price war of sorts for gigabit broadband in cities. For example, in highly competitive markets, customers can buy a gigabit from AT&T for $65 per month, with even lower introductory prices for new customers. Cable companies are falling all over themselves with low rates to keep customers from churning. It seems like a WISP that doesn’t have to support a wired network ought to be able to be price-competitive.

Wireless technology also brings a new option for redundancy for businesses. A growing percentage of businesses are willing to pay for two diversely routed ISPs to make sure they can stay connected to broadband. A wireless backup provides a lot more safety as a backup connection since local events like a downed pole might knock out both fiber and the cable company.

It’s an interesting option that brings a real wireless option for many urban homes. The FCC broadband map shows that I have eight choices of broadband at my house, but most of them are wireless carriers that can’t actually serve me with acceptable broadband. I’ve never understood why WISPs claim coverage across whole cities. When I look at detailed Ookla speed tests, most cities show barely any actual use from the WISPs. There are exceptions, but the current FCC maps are highly exaggerated for cities. But the FCC has no incentive to clean up the maps when every home in a city has one or two legitimate options for gigabit broadband.

The Tarana announcement has to worry the big cable companies that are already struggling to hang on to every customer. Losing even just a few thousand customers in every urban market to WISPs presents a new competitive worry.

Broadband Technology Improving

As has happened continuously since the introduction of DSL and 1 Mbps cable modems, the major broadband technologies continue to evolve and get faster.

Cable HFC technology is getting faster. Harmonic, one of the makers of core cable broadband technology, recently announced that the company had achieved a 14 Gbps speed with DOCSIS 4.0. The test was achieved during a CableLabs interoperability event. The speed was achieved in a mock-up that included achieving the faster speed using technology provided by multiple other vendors.

The test was achieved with an updated CMTS (which is the main hub router in a cable modem network). The speed beats the old record of 10 Gbps, also achieved by Harmonic. It’s unlikely that any cable companies will try to achieve that speed since it would mean sacrificing some upload speeds with current DOCSIS 4.0 technology. But a faster CMTS would allow a cable company to offer a true 10 Gbps download product. These kinds of breakthroughs are also important since they are the first step towards developing the next generation of electronics.

Faster home broadband service from fiber is also improving. Earlier this year, Nokia announced the availability of two different 25 Gbps customer modems, making it realistic for ISPs to offer the faster 25 Gbps service on a PON fiber network.

Nokia also recently announced the release of a 25G PON card for the network core that can simultaneously support all of the flavors of PON, including GPON, XGS-PON, and 25G PON. The company said the card would easily be able to handle the upcoming 50G PON. Having a core with this flexibility will allow ISPs to keep customers on older GPON technology without having to force an update when the newer technologies are introduced to the network.

Finally, Nokia announced the release of some new home WiFi 7 gateways for the home. The  Beacon 4 gateway can reach speeds of 3.6 Gbps, and the tri-band Beacon 9 gateway offers 9.4 Gbps speeds. These are added to a line of gateways that top out with the Beacon 24, which can achieve home WiFi speeds of 24 Gbps. The new generation of WiFi 7 routers offers the possibility of superfast speeds inside the home using 6 GHz spectrum, while at the same time still connecting to older devices using 2.5 and 5 GHz spectrum.

Another major announcement is the new generation of Tarana radios for fixed wireless. The specifications on the new radios are a leap forward in capacity and performance. The first-generation G1 radio platform could support up to 1,000 customers per tower, 250 per sector. Each sector could accept up to 2.5 gigabits of backhaul bandwidth. The new G2 platform can support up to 512 customers per sector (2048 for a tower). The radios can accept as much as 6 gigabits of backhaul bandwidth per sector.

We can’t leave out satellite technology. The first-generation Starlink satellite weighed around 570 pounds and had a total downlink budget of about 20 Gbps. Starlink is introducing its third generation of satellite that weighs almost 4,200 pounds and has a downlink budget of 1 Tbps and 160 Gbps in aggregate uplink capacity.

This is a sampling of technology improvements and is not meant to exclude improvements being introduced by other vendors. There are many other important improvements including faster lasers for long-haul fiber routes and point-to-point broadband connections using light.