Illinois Electric Cooperative Uses Fixed Wireless for Connect America Fund II Build

The Illinois Electric Cooperative (IEC) said it will use funding received through the Connect America Fund II (CAF II) auction to deploy fixed wireless in rural Pike County (IL). IEC will use technology from Ericsson and Xtreme LTE for the deployment, which will use the CBRS spectrum. The companies did not indicate whether the spectrum to be used is in the licensed or unlicensed portion of the band. Fixed wireless technology has made big gains in recent years, and both LTE and CBRS spectrum were key developments to boost speeds and performance. Because LTE has been widely used by mobile providers, it offers economies of scale that didn’t exist with earlier generation fixed wireless. And the CBRS band includes a broad swath of mid-band spectrum, which is seen as providing the optimum mixture of speeds and coverage. The CAF II auction awarded funding to cover some of the costs of deploying broadband to unserved areas, with funding going to the company that committed to deploying service in an area for the lowest level of support. A weighting system favored bids to provide higher-speed, lower latency service. IEC’s win was in the “above baseline” category, which requires the company to deploy service at speeds of at least 100 Mbps downstream and 20 Mbps upstream.