While both indoor and outdoor FWA have been around for a long time, the recent explosive growth has mainly been in Indoor offerings.
However, this is now shifting toward Outdoor devices as improved reach and performance accelerate deployments and, in turn, transform the overall economics of FWA.
Why Indoor paved the way for early adoption…
Fixed Wireless offerings based on Indoor devices (typically with Wi-Fi AP integrated into the same unit) offer the path of least resistance to getting an FWA solution to the market for most mobile carriers. A single device, self-Installed by the end user (often collected in-person from the mobile carrier’s retail shop or sent in the post after ordering over the Internet) follows a familiar fulfilment process for mobile carriers and customers i.e. it’s identical to the process for connecting a new customer to a smartphone today. No investment in a field force was required, customer fulfilment was quick, and to the end customer it was a very simple proposition.
Following this simple indoor connectivity model, the number of connected FWA users has surpassed all the original marketing forecasts, and most carrier’s marketing departments have been more than satisfied with their progress and market penetration.
Why the shift to Outdoor FWA?
Indoor FWA devices are essentially not much different to your smartphones – both have a mobile chipset and some antennas. The main difference is that your smartphone has a battery (and a screen) whereas an Indoor FWA device is powered by AC and has larger antennas.
While cellular/mobile networks are improving every day, most users have encountered issues at times where smartphone indoor reception was far from ideal. For example, when a user can only achieve a single bar on their phone, the solution is often to walk to the nearest window or go outside. Why? The answer is simple – radio waves find it easier to travel through the air than they do through walls or windows. The higher the frequency of the radio wave (and typically 5G high bandwidth signals are at higher frequencies than traditional cellular signals) the harder it is to travel through solid substances. The result is that the signal received by the device is significantly reduced in strength after coming inside the building. We call this “attenuation” or “penetration-loss”.
The larger and more numerous antennas in the indoor FWA device partially compensate for this attenuation, but aesthetic constraints on a device that needs to be visible inside the home place practical limits on how large these antennas can be.
Now let’s explore why is this important. Imagine being in a large room and wanting to speak to a friend on the other side of the room. Shouting can get your message across easily as your friend will be hearing your voice at loud volumes (higher power). Now imagine you start to lower your voice, at some point in time after lowering the volume, your friend starts to have problems understanding you. You may need to repeat yourself or talk slower. In either case, it takes longer to get your message across.
This is exactly what happens in a cellular/mobile network. Devices which can listen to the network at high power levels can receive the data easily, without retries. But devices which are having to contend with lower power levels of the signal require the network to talk slower and to attempt to send the same information multiple times. The result is that the network becomes less efficient. For example, while you may eventually download a movie over your FWA device with poor signal strength, your FWA device is consuming network resources which could have been used for one of your neighbours.
With the cost of spectrum for the cellular/mobile carriers being very expensive (from millions to billions of dollars), the efficiency of the radio network to support thousands of end users, multiple device types, and multiple service types simultaneously, is key.
