TORONTO – One of the things Canadians learned the hard way this past July when Rogers had its nationwide outage, is how important network resiliency – and redundancy – is, especially when it comes to essential services.
During a panel on how operators are leveraging fixed wireless access and fibre to the premise to fix the digital divide yesterday at the Canadian Network Operators of Canada’s 2022 ISP Summit, Shaun Brennan (above, right), regional sales manager at Calix, explained they have been seeing demand lately for fixed wireless as a complement to fibre for resiliency purposes.
Noting the Rogers outage “really highlighted this issue”, Brennan pointed out there are other problems as well.
“Customers, especially with the growth of telecommuting and the work from home culture that isn’t going to go away, customers are going to be far more attentive… than they ever have been in the past,” he said, adding that “having some sort of failover wireless backup solution for the WiFi in the home is becoming a clearer and bigger trend and fixed wireless could definitely played a role in that.”
The panel, which was moderated by Scott Holmes (left), CEO of Extreme Technology Corporation, also talked about the use of fixed wireless to address Canada’s digital divide.
Vardin Amiri (centre), sales engineer at Tarana Wireless, told the audience while fibre is good, for several reasons it is not viable to get it to everyone.
“So, what do we do?”
Amiri said, “one of the most viable solutions is next generation fixed wireless access – and the reason I say next generation is because it’s not the existing type of wireless solution you have today whether they are based on WiFi or LTE.”
With next generation you would get higher capacities compared to traditional types of wireless solutions, he explained, adding “next generation fixed wireless access will allow you to compete and bring lower costs to your users and give them the capacities that they need for schools, whether it’s video or whatever the case may be.”
Fixed wireless is also proving to be useful to operators who are planning to switch over to fibre down the road.
Brennan noted there are some new operators particularly in the U.S. who have used fixed wireless as an entry point into a community and then started to deploy fibre when they reach a certain level of penetration.
Amiri said the breakpoint for those using fixed wireless with the intention of transitioning to fibre depends on the service provider: “What are their requirements? What are they budgeting for?”
He pointed out they have seen customers using next generation fixed wireless access to deliver 100 Mbps. “Now, if their next step is 200, 300, your next generation fixed wireless access can still handle that so you can put out that timeframe further on,” he said.
