Rural Digital Opportunity Fund Gigabit Fixed Wireless Winners Lean on Tarana Technology

Tarana is expected to supply gigabit fixed wireless for at least one or two of the biggest winning Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) bidders; one of which is Nextlink. Tarana's new hardware will be able to use spectrum in the 5 GHz and 6 GHz bands, as well as new software that supports what the company calls G1x2 mode. That mode enables the new hardware or the previous version of the hardware to use up to 160 MHz of spectrum. The previous version of Tarana’s offering worked only in the 5 GHz band and could use only 80 MHz of spectrum. Spectrum in both the 5 GHz band and 6 GHz band is available on an unlicensed basis. Nextlink plans to use fixed wireless, along with fiber broadband, to support service at speeds of 1 Gbps downstream and 500 Mbps upstream. Nextlink won $429 million in the RDOF auction and recently had funding authorized by the Federal Communication Commission. Another one of the top 10 winning RDOF bidders – Resound Networks – has not yet had its funding authorized, but also plans to use a combination of fixed wireless and fiber broadband to support gigabit speeds. Resound has touted the ability of Tarana equipment, as well as equipment from at least two other manufacturers, to support the speeds required for RDOF builds.