Is FWA momentum finally coming to LatAm telcos?

FWA, or fixed wireless access, is yet to really take off in Latin America, mostly due to scale and costs.

The technology, which turns the public mobile broadband network into a Wi-Fi-like service for homes or businesses, promises to be a solution especially for places where fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) connections are, for different reasons, unfeasible.

And FWA is now starting to spread with new products being offered, at lower prices, public financing and with operators embracing 5G technology commercially.

“We already have over 2,000 CPEs [customer premises equipment] delivered to Claro for this residential service. It's still a relatively small scale, but it's significant. Several other carriers and ISPs are testing it. We should announce new B2B and B2C projects by the end of the year,” Amilcar Scheffer, networks director at Brazil’s Intelbras, told BNamericas.

CPEs are similar to routers and are used to radiate mobile broadband. Scheffer was referring to a newly announced project by Claro for the offer of 5G FWA, the first of its kind in Brazil.

The telco is offering residential internet plans using its 5G mobile network as fixed wireless access, with speeds of up to 1Gbps. The service is available both for customers in the residential segment and for small and medium-sized companies.

To use Claro's 5G network with FWA, it is necessary to be in an area with 5G coverage and to contract one of the new plans, in addition to acquiring the 5G CPE with Wi-Fi 6 capabilities.

The Intelbras CPE, powered by Qualcomm chipsets, enables the connection of up to 128 devices simultaneously.

BNamericas has learned that the price of each CPE equipment with Claro is around 1,000 reais (about US$200). Roughly 70-80% of that is for Qualcomm's chipsets.

Two other lines of Intelbras CPEs for FWA, with chipsets from previous versions of Qualcomm's chipsets, and with fewer simultaneous connection capabilities, for example, should be available at lower prices, which the manufacturer hopes will help spread the product even further in the market.

In addition to the indoor FWA equipment, Intelbras intends to launch a solution for outdoor FWA soon.

“FWA itself is nothing new. We have been working with FWA for some time, with banks, among others,” Claro’s CEO, Paulo César Teixeira, said during a Qualcomm event in São Paulo this week.

The difference now is having the product off-the-shelf, for B2C clients and using 5G technology.

In addition to Claro, ISP Brisanet plans to offer 5G FWA in large cities, as redundancy (back-up) for the fixed connectivity it offers to the corporate segment, in addition to an offer for consumers in smaller cities.

“We are going to take a radius of more or less 3km of coverage of the tower from the urban area to offer the service [in B2C],” said CEO José Roberto Nogueira at the event. 

Brisanet intends to launch this offer in the next three months.

Telefônica Brasil's B2B director, Alex Salgado, said the operator already offers fixed wireless broadband services to customers, although with other features and not marketing the product as FWA.

“It's not a question of making a big market announcement,” said Salgado in reply to BNamericas during a conversation with journalists, referring to Claro's hype about its 5G FWA service.

In any case, the operator is considering launching 5G FWA CPEs for residential customers in the coming months.

TIM does not yet have defined plans for FWA. The company's CTO, Leonardo Capdeville, said during the event that it is still necessary to reduce the price of the device, although he added that the company is looking into the technology.

OUTDOOR

Elsys is another local manufacturer betting on 5G FWA. 

The company has just launched the first equipment for outdoor use, dubbed Amplimax Ultra and tailored for the B2B segment.

“The project is 100% Elsys. It is leaving the factory, with a Qualcomm chipset. As of now, it's on the market. Companies are testing and some carriers already have the equipment in the approval process with us,” Elsys CEO Damian Zisman told BNamericas.

For now, however, Elsys has no signed contracts for the new technology.

The equipment is being manufactured at the company’s factory in Manaus. By the end of the year, Elsys plans to be exporting it to the US and other countries in Latin America, as it does with other equipment it manufactures in Brazil. 

Elsys already offers Amplimax line solutions to customers as a redundant link for fiber connections, although not in 5G technology.

According to Zisman, the company's bet on outdoor FWA, rather than on indoor FWA like Intelbras, is due to the propagation characteristics of the mobile networks. In indoor, walls, windows and other elements act as obstacles to 4G and 5G signals.

The executive also said carriers can benefit from lower investments in infrastructure, as the use of outdoor FWA would optimize network resources, with increased spectral efficiency, and allowing up to three times more customers to be linked to a single mobile tower.

“An operator which makes the investment in an ERB [tower] for indoor FWA use exclusively, will have fewer customers out of it. If that same operator puts FWA outdoors, it will reach three times the number of customers with the same capacity. Because the use of frequency is better utilized, there is no loss,” said Zisman.

Elsys' FWA CPE product has a long-range antenna, called 4x4 MIMO, is dustproof and water resistant, and according to the company has a range eight times greater than indoor 5G modem solutions.

Because it is more complex, however, outdoor FWA is more expensive than indoor FWA.

“What is pending for FWA 5G to take off is scale. It is just a matter of scale,” said Zisman.

BNDES FINANCING

To help with the issue of costs, public sector banks are offering loans for FWA.

“It’s very likely FWA will be, if not the killer application, one of the killer applications for 5G,” Carlos Azen, telecom, IT and creative economy manager at Brazil’s federal development bank BNDES, told the event.

BNDES announced lines to finance CPE for 4G and 5G FWA, backed by resources from the Fust telecoms fund.

According to Azen, citing GSMA estimates, FWA can reduce by some 50% the costs of broadband installations in rural areas.

The financing lines for FWA announced by Azen come with various conditions, with the most advantageous and subsidized interest rates being reserved for FWA projects in schools, rural areas and deprived urban zones. 

US-based Cambium Networks is another wireless infrastructure supplier offering fixed wireless and Wi-Fi to broadband service providers and businesses.

The company says it is waiting for regulator Anatel's approval for the use of the 6GHz spectrum for Wi-Fi for outdoor services. Anatel already cleared the whole of the band for Wi-Fi, but for indoor services.

According to Roberto Camara, CEO of Cambium in Brazil, the equipment for this use is ready. “We want it for yesterday,” said the executive about Anatel's pending approval.