The future of fixed wireless in South Africa

Fixed wireless access (FWA) continues to play an important role in connecting communities and businesses to the Internet in less-populated areas with little or no fixed broadband coverage.

That is the view of Vodacom and Herotel, which sell this product to business and home customers, respectively.

Some fixed wireless broadband uses unlicenced non-GSM spectrum, competing against cellular operators and offering connectivity in places without 4G or 5G coverage.

This same spectrum is also used for regular Wi-Fi in homes and offices.

Typically, a fixed-wireless provider installs radio equipment on a tower serving a specific area. That equipment is connected to a backhaul network that provides access to the Internet.

A customer then has an antenna installed at their home, which is directed towards the tower to facilitate two-way communication.

The advantage of these systems is that they don’t require cables to be rolled out to each customer’s home.

In addition, because the sites handle fewer customers than many 4G towers, these fixed wireless products can be uncapped.

However, FWA is not as fast or reliable as fibre and often lags behind mobile network performance too.

It has grown expensive relative to other broadband types with the same or similar speeds.

Major fibre network operators (FNOs) in South Africa have rapidly expanded their networks in recent years, even moving into smaller towns and some areas where FWA or mobile were previously the only options.

In addition, several mobile network operators now offer either high-capacity or uncapped fixed-location LTE or 5G packages in areas that don’t have fixed-line connectivity.

FWA is also expected to face increased competition from satellite-based Internet in the coming years.

While satellite-based Internet connectivity has been around for a long time, low-earth orbit (LEO) systems like SpaceX’s Starlink, Amazon’s Project Kuiper, and OneWeb are poised to improve vastly in terms of performance.

Companies like AST SpaceMobile, Lynk Global, and Starlink are also testing providing standard 4G and 5G coverage from satellites.

Vodacom Business managing executive Fatima Hassim said the company believes fixed-wireless will still make for a viable business case, particularly for small-to-medium enterprises and home-based office.

“We have had an increase in sales for fixed wireless access, particularly in the outlying areas where there is no fibre coverage,” said Hassim.

Hassim said Vodacom’s wireless service provided a business-grade reliable experience more suited to applications susceptible to latency.

“An area where alternative solutions such as satellite and mobile broadband have not proven themselves, is in providing symmetrical throughputs whereas our ISM wireless has proven successful in this environment,” Hassim said.

But Hassim acknowledged the rise of satellite Internet would likely impact FWA in certain areas.

“Factors that will need to be considered are performance indicators such as latency, packet loss and jitter, coverage, pricing and cost of redundancy, specifically for business customers,” Hassim said.

Hassim said the availability of more mobile spectrum could also impact demand for unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum but FWA still had several advantages that businesses needed to consider:

• Reliability and suitability for business-grade applications that require SLAs on throughput and performance
• Redundancy — Can you provide connectivity from totally separate access routes over these technologies and if so at what cost?
• Right price – Network operators will have to evaluate the cost of maintaining these wireless networks versus replacing it with 5G as last-mile offerings.

A Herotel representative told MyBroadband that FWA was still the most effective way to connect consumers and businesses living on the urban edge or in rural communities, both in terms of product performance and pricing.

“We continue to see healthy demand for our products in the areas mentioned above,” they said.

Herotel believes satellite will primarily be suitable in rural communities where fixed-wireless networks cannot be built at scale.

The representative also maintained that spectrum-dependant solutions like 4G and 5G could not replace FWA.

“The spectrum has finite capacity constraints and with the ever-increasing demand for high-speed broadband services it will eventually once again face the same congestion issues that the operators have battled with in the past,” they said.

“License-exempt solutions will always have an important role to play.”

MyBroadband contacted Amobia, Skywire, and Comsol for comment, but they did not respond by the time of publication.

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