Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Will Put Gigabit Fixed Wireless to the Test

David Sumi is vice president of marketing for Siklu, a fixed wireless equipment manufacturer that was part of a group of manufacturers that convinced the Federal Communications Commission to allow Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) fixed wireless bids for the gigabit tier. According to Sumi, there have been a lot of advances in fixed wireless recently. He described two Siklu offerings that could be used for gigabit fixed wireless deployments and noted that other manufacturers have similar offerings. All the offerings that Sumi described use ultra-high frequency millimeter wave spectrum in one of two unlicensed bands – the V-band around 60 GHz and the E-band around 70-80 GHz. The biggest breakthroughs have come in the V-band, where Qualcomm offers a chip based on Terragraph technology, whose development was spear-headed by Facebook. As Sumi described, equipment based on the Qualcomm chip is designed with a four-sector base station, with each sector capable of aggregate speeds of 4 Gbps, which can be shared by up to 16 customer premises devices. Network operators can oversubscribe customers because deployment models assume not everyone is on the internet using a full gigabit at the same time. Range is about a quarter of mile, which doesn’t sound like much for rural areas, but the technology also supports mesh networking, enabling individual customer sites to act as repeaters for other sites. For more remote locations, network operators can use equipment operating in the E-band, which is restricted to point-to-point use, Sumi said.