With fixed wireless access (FWA) or wireless home broadband seen as one of the prominent use case of 5G, San Diego-based chip company Qualcomm is working with telecom service providers to reduce the cost of the FWA consumer premises equipment (CPE) or router.
In FWA equipment, chipset plays a key role and constitutes a major portion of cost. Telecom service providers such as Bharti Airtel have been expressing concern over FWA router cost at $180, against $100-120, which they incur in connecting homes using fibre.
“We at Qualcomm are working towards bringing the cost of fixed wireless access as close as we can to that of fiber. Our customers have notified their expectations and we are working towards that,” Rajen Vagadia, vice president at Qualcomm and president of its India and SAARC operations, told FE. “Yet at no point in time, a carrier (telco) should expect that they have got what they wanted (with regard to FWA) because that’s how they push us and that’s how we keep pushing ourselves for being more innovative,” Vagadia said, adding that in the next six months to one year there will be an increased rollout of FWA.
At present, telcos provide home broadband services largely by laying fibre. However, owing to costs and other administrative issues at the local level, progress on this front has been relatively slow. Comparatively, wireless networks such as FWA are easier to rollout, operate and maintain than wired networks (FTTH), which are prone to breakage due to digging and construction activities.
“It’s been seven years since we have started deploying fibre and connecting homes. If fibre was affordable, why are there only around 30-40 million homes connected? Going forward, it will become very difficult to rollout fibre-based connectivity while maintaining the costs,” Vagadia said.
According to Vagadia, for telcos to reach out to the next 100 million homes, FWA is the most prominent way. Going forward, with increased volumes also the pricing factor will be much better, he said.
In India, both Qualcomm and MediaTek are working with telcos around FWA. Qualcomm also announced its partnership with Jio to launch its 5G FWA solution Jio AirFiber.