ACCEPTED FROM OPEN CALL
Can 5G Fixed Broadband Bridge
the Rural Digital Divide?
Andrew Lappalainen and Catherine Rosenberg
Abstract
The digital divide between rural and urban
communities is a significant problem in today’s
connected world. Until recently, infrastructure
costs have limited how effectively fixed broad-
band (FB) Internet services could be offered to
rural regions. However, with 4G, a convergence
between FB and mobile services has started to
emerge via fixed wireless access (FWA), which
has made it possible for operators to provide (lim-
ited) FB to rural communities using existing cellu-
lar infrastructure. To bridge the digital divide, rural
FWA must be able to provide an end-to-end expe-
rience comparable to urban FB. In this regard, 4G
is inadequate, but 5G can make a difference. In
this article we examine how 5G FWA could truly
enable FB in rural regions. We present improve-
ments to each area of the 5G architecture,
including new and upcoming advances in 3GPP
Releases 16 and 17, and examine how they can
benefit rural FWA users. Despite these advances,
5G operators will face a number of challenges
in planning and operating rural FWA networks.
Hence, the second objective of this article is to
outline future research directions in this context.
Introduction
Despite many technological advances in Inter-
net connectivity in recent decades, the at-home
Internet experience in rural communities contin-
ues to lag behind urban communities, creating
a digital divide between the two regions. 1 Not-
ing that it might never be possible to fully bridge
this divide (the experience of urban households
keeps on improving, making it a moving target
for rural households), many governments have
established universal expectations for fixed broad-
band (FB) services defined by certain minimum
bit rate (MBR) requirements [1, 2] — for example,
50 Mb/s on the downlink (DL) and 10 Mb/s on
the uplink (UL) — which relate directly to the qual-
ity of experience (QoE). However, these expecta-
tions are rarely met in rural areas. For example, in
Canada and the United States, the availability of
a high data rate FB service received by users at
home is sharply divided between urban and rural
areas, as shown in Table 1 for the DL. Until now,
existing technologies have been unable to narrow
that disparity, but 5G could be the turning point.
Traditionally, rural FB was mostly offered via a
wired infrastructure (e.g., DSL, cable, fiber) that
was expensive to build and operate over large
areas with a small number of users. Hence, rural
The authors are with the University of Waterloo, Canada.
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network infrastructure was often out-of-date and
under-provisioned, which led to degraded QoE
compared to urban communities and limited the
extent to which rural homes and businesses could
participate in the online ecosystem.
However, mobile network operators (MNOs)
have made significant investments in rural commu-
nities in Canada and the United States, and today,
over 95 percent of rural households in these coun-
tries have 4G mobile coverage or better [1, 2].
Thus, the mobile broadband divide between urban
and rural communities is significantly smaller than
the FB divide. Hence, it made sense to consider
cellular — via fixed wireless access (FWA) — as an
option to offer FB to rural homes. This makes the
cellular infrastructure “multi-service” (i.e., offering
mobile and FB), which creates a host of new chal-
lenges and opportunities.
FB services differ from the services typically
offered in mobile networks. In particular, IPTV is
often a major component of FB, and since screens
used for video streaming are much larger at home,
the data rate requirements are high. In addition,
small businesses (and possibly homes) might host
servers, putting more pressure on the UL. As
already discussed, to support FB, FWA needs to
offer acceptable MBRs to each subscribing home
on both the DL and the UL. This type of require-
ment is new for cellular. Simply put, to offer FB in
rural areas, MNOs must offer more than coverage:
it is critical that they provide capacity as well.
Despite its success as a mobile service, 4G is
ill-equipped to meet the FB MBR requirements
at rural households since it is limited in terms of
available bands and its multiple-input multiple-out-
put (MIMO) and beamforming capabilities. Thus,
despite the fact that 4G service is nearly omnipres-
ent in rural communities, 4G FWA has been unable
to have a significant impact on rural FB. 5G might
be revolutionary in this regard, however. Indeed,
5G brings advances to the access, backhaul, and
network edge that will make it a viable technolo-
gy for fixed, mobile, and Internet of Things (IoT)
applications in the rural context; so much so that it
is anticipated that MNOs could dominate the rural
Internet market in the future. One objective of this 1 We note that although the
article is to present 5G FWA and outline new and distinction between “rural”
upcoming features of 5G from 3rd Generation and “urban” is somewhat
Partnership Project (3GPP) Releases 16 and 17 subjective, rural can general-
that will benefit the delivery of FB in rural areas, ly be understood to apply to
regions with population densi-
focusing on each area of the network architecture. ties less than several hundred
5G FWA will enable users to combine their ser- people per square kilometer.
vices and subscriptions in new ways (e.g., by bun-
Digital Object Identifier:
10.1109/MCOMSTD.0001.2100092
2471-2825/22/$25.00 © 2022 IEEE 79
 Urban areas Rural areas
Canada (% of households) [1] 97.4 65.4
USA (% of census blocks) [2] 98.4 74.9
Table 1. Availability of 50 Mb/s DL data rates in Canada and the United States.
5G RAN
5G FWA
antenna
Broadband Internet
IPTV
Modem with
5G SIM card
Figure 1. Rural fixed wireless access. A home with a 5G FWA subscription
enables users to access multiple types of services (e.g., home broadband
and IPTV) through a single modem.
Internet
Network Edge
Core Network
Backhaul
RAN
Figure 2. 5G architecture, including the radio access network (RAN),
backhaul, network edge, and core network.
dling mobile plans together with home services).
Hence, 5G FWA will not only improve the rural
QoE, but is also likely to provide rural users with
better contracts and service options. The second
goal of this article is to highlight the open challeng-
es and questions MNOs would face in planning
and operating a rural converged 5G network.
To set the stage for the remainder of the arti-
cle, please refer to Fig. 1. Rural 5G FWA requires
homes or businesses to be equipped with roof
mounted, high gain antennas. The MNO assists
with the installation to achieve line of sight to the
best base station (BS). Connected to each antenna
is a modem with a 5G SIM card, which provides
5G-based FB services to users within the premises.
5G and How It Can Improve
the Rural Fixed Broadband
Experience
5G builds upon decades of past work on earli-
er generations of cellular communications and
brings vast improvements to data rates, latency,
mobility management, and energy efficiency. At
the same time, 5G revolutionizes cellular technol-
ogy in that it no longer targets personal mobile
communications only. Indeed, 5G is intended
80
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to offer diverse types of services with different
requirements, including mobile and FB services
requiring enhanced data rates, energy-efficient
IoT, and ultra-reliable low-latency communications
(URLLC) for vehicular or industrial applications.
To enable these services, with 5G, 3GPP brings
improvements to every area of the network archi-
tecture illustrated in Fig. 2, including the radio
access network (RAN), the 5G core network
(5GC), which provides end user functionality for
mobility, billing, and other services and which is
a gateway to external networks, the backhaul,
which interconnects the RAN and 5GC, and the
so-called network edge, which enables data, appli-
cations, and other specialized network functions
closer to end users, somewhere between the
5GC and RAN, in order to improve QoE.
The shift toward FB services with minimum rate
requirements through FWA will require 5G MNOs
to provide a well-managed, end-to-end service.
Hence, the advances in each area of the network
will be critical to making 5G FWA a success, espe-
cially in rural regions where the path from a home
to the gateway might incorporate many backhaul
hops. We now describe these improvements and
how they will help make rural 5G FWA a success.
Access
Advances in (multi-user) MIMO and beamforming
technologies, the 5G new radio (NR) air inter-
face [3], and the availability of new wireless bands
make it possible to offer significantly higher data
rates to a significantly higher number of users per
cell than 4G.
Multi-user massive MIMO (MU-MIMO) has
the potential to provide a 10-fold increase in sys-
tem capacity over single-user MIMO used in 4G
by increasing the number of antennas at the BSs
and enabling transmission to/from multiple users
in the same resource block [4]. This multi-user
transmission is enabled by the combined gains
from spatial multiplexing, improved signal ener-
gy from antenna beamforming, and reduced
interference due to precoding at the transmitters
and combining at the receivers. Together, these
benefits give rise to a much higher signal-to-inter-
ference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) and hence better
rates, particularly for cell edge users. This is essen-
tial in the rural context since capacity and coverage
are both needed. MU-MIMO is especially well suit-
ed for rural FWA given that homes are non-mobile
and likely to be well separated from one another,
providing an ideal beamforming environment [5].
As discussed later, these benefits introduce addi-
tional complexity to network planning and opera-
tion, which would need to be properly managed.
In Release 16, codebook improvements have dou-
bled the possible number of streams for MU-MI-
MO users (from 2 to 4), while also reducing the
channel state information (CSI) overhead. Release
17 further reduces the MU-MIMO overhead
through improved channel estimation techniques;
it also proposes new techniques to improve UL
MIMO capacity and coverage.
The 5G NR interface is designed to be flexible
and efficient to meet varying network environ-
ments and diverse service requirements of users.
To this end, 5G NR enables operators to config-
ure different channel frame structures depending
on the need [3]. The NR radio frame supports
IEEE Communications Standards Magazine • June 2022
various subcarrier bandwidths, giving rise to dif-
ferent orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing
(OFDM) symbol durations. This enables short-
er time slot durations, which will enable shorter
transmission time intervals and hence lower-laten-
cy transmissions. This flexibility is also necessary
for 5G to support mid-bands and new millime-
ter-wave (mmWave) bands, which have very dif-
ferent Doppler characteristics. NR time-division
duplex (TDD) will allow for flexible UL and DL
resource configurations. This might be very useful
in scenarios where the UL needs more resources
such as for FB services.
An abundance of new spectrum is made
available for 5G. Most notable are the mmWave
bands, whose large bandwidth creates the poten-
tial for high capacity. However, coverage is at a
disadvantage with mmWave, given its propaga-
tion characteristics. The capacity-coverage trade-
off of mmWave is unclear, and hence so is the
benefit of mmWave for rural FB. Nonetheless,
new sub-6 GHz TDD bands (i.e., mid-bands) have
also been made available. Mid-bands were pre-
viously considered unsuitable for mobile com-
munications in rural regions because of their
poor characteristics. However, these bands might
be useful for FB since FWA homes will have
roof-mounted, high gain, and high transmit power
antennas that can handle them more effective-
ly than mobile devices. Beginning with Release
16, access to unlicensed spectrum is also made
possible [6]. Although proper interference coor-
dination is required for unlicensed access, it is
anticipated that this coordination will be easier
to manage in sparse regions with fewer interfer-
ence sources; hence, unlicensed spectrum could
be highly beneficial in rural regions. Aside from
newly available spectrum, MNOs might also have
access to the portion of their regular bands that
they are not using in rural regions. Typically, this
has been because the extra capacity was not
needed in these regions for mobile services. In
this case, the bands can be readily deployed to
add capacity to rural sites for FWA.
Backhaul
The backhaul has a direct impact on the QoE
given to end users. In fact, unless the capacity of
the backhaul is scaled up to accommodate the
RAN, efforts spent increasing capacity in the RAN
with massive MU-MIMO, 5G NR, and new bands
will be wasted. In rural areas, backhaul has usually
been provided using microwave point-to-point
(MWP2P) technology [7], which is a cost-effective
solution for providing low-to-mid data rates over
long-distance hops. To increase the capacity of
the backhaul, similar approaches (e.g., MIMO,
new bands) as those presented above for the
RAN can be used.
Beginning with Release 16, it is possible to
establish backhaul connections between neighbor-
ing BSs using the same antennas, bands, and radio
protocols that are used to provide user access in
the RAN. In other words, BSs can connect with
each other using 5G NR as opposed to MWP2P
or fiber backhaul technology. This new function-
ality is called integrated access and backhaul
(IAB) [6, 8], and it might be very useful in rural
areas. IAB is designed to use TDD spectrum in
both sub-6 GHz and mmWave bands. Given the
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Out-of-band IAB
In-band IAB
Out-of-band IAB
In-band IAB MWP2P
Figure 3. Integrated access and backhaul (IAB) makes use of NR access
technology to provide backhaul connections between neighboring BSs.
In-band IAB shares its spectrum with the RAN. Out-of-band IAB uses
dedicated spectrum. IAB bands and technology differ from those used for
MWP2P.
asymmetric nature of most Internet traffic, having
a TDD-based backhaul that allows a greater share
of resources to be occupied by the DL could be
advantageous in comparison to MWP2P, which
utilizes frequency-division duplex (FDD) channels
with symmetric DL/UL bandwidths.
IAB has two modes: in-band and out-of-band.
In-band IAB uses bands that are shared with user
access. Hence, it treats a connected BS like any
other user equipment on the DL, meaning the BS
must be scheduled alongside users. In Release 16,
in-band IAB nodes cannot transmit to users while
receiving data from another IAB node (i.e., oper-
ation is half-duplex); however, duplexing enhance-
ments are included in Release 17. Out-of-band
IAB uses dedicated bands for backhauling. In the
rural context, MNOs might find out-of-band IAB
to be a way to put currently unused spectrum to
good use. The two IAB modes are depicted in Fig.
3. Release 17 also introduces the ability for IAB
BSs to dynamically adjust their backhaul topolo-
gies with one another, thereby improving robust-
ness in the network.
Network Edge and Core Network
To improve connection robustness and latency,
and hence perceived QoE, MNOs need to be
able to move control plane functionality as well as
user content (via caching) closer to the network
edge. This would also reduce the traffic on the
backhaul, an added benefit.
This requirement to do things locally is not new
to 5G, nor is it unique to the rural context; how-
ever, the virtualization, through network function
virtualization (NFV), of the 5GC makes it easier
to distribute functionality closer to the network
edge than before and makes it possible to do so at
lower cost and in a scalable manner [9]. Similarly,
multi-access edge computing (MEC) will enable
operators to cache user content closer to rural sites
and move application servers to the network edge,
improving responsiveness and download times
for FB and mobile users as well as reducing traffic
and signaling loads on the backhaul [10]. This will
require cooperation on the part of content pro-
viders and application developers, who might be
motivated to help in this way out of recognition of
the benefit to end users. Nevertheless, some par-
ties might be unwilling to help out of good will, in
which case the involvement of regulators might be
necessary [11]. When determining where to distrib-
ute functionality, MNOs must balance costs against
QoE. For example, assuming that the backhaul fol-
lows some type of tree topology, it would be very
81

Until now, the backhaul
has been dimensioned
for mobile users, which
have no MBR expectation.
However, FWA services will
require MNOs to make sig-
nificant upgrades to their
backhaul.
82
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costly to place functions at every leaf node even
though it could provide the highest QoE.
Open Challenges to Improving
Rural Fixed Broadband Using 5G
To enable 5G FWA in rural areas, a number of
open challenges remain to be solved, which we
now discuss.
Network Planning and
Operation for 5G FWA
The focus on providing home-oriented services,
such as broadband Internet and IPTV, for FWA
users will require MNOs to plan and operate their
networks differently than in the past when ser-
vices were oriented around mobile users.
It is expected that service level agreements
(SLAs) between MNOs and their subscribers will
establish different commitments for different ser-
vices; for example, an MBR for FB Internet service
on both the DL and the UL (although different
values), or a guaranteed IPTV service. The first
challenge is thus a planning (or dimensioning)
problem. As always, there are different flavors of
the planning problem, but we expect that, initially
at least, the placement problem can be avoided
by using the existing 4G infrastructure. Selecting
the right band(s) is critical to 5G FWA. MNOs
need to know which bands work better in the 5G
rural FB context. Are mmWave bands useful for
access or for backhaul (discussed next), or are
only sub-6 GHz bands practical? Once the appro-
priate bands are determined, the next problem is
to determine how many homes can be offered FB
for these bands. Specifically, given a fixed amount
of access and backhaul resources (e.g., band(s),
bandwidth, transmit power, characteristics of the
massive MIMO antennas at the RAN and homes),
an MNO needs to determine the maximum
number of active homes that can be given the
MBRs in a given cell [12]. Note that this problem
is difficult at many levels: it involves MU-MIMO
(hence the need for precoding and combining),
couples the UL and DL via TDD (because there is
an opportunity to intelligently configure the TDD
frame according to the traffic mix), and couples
the RAN and backhaul. Homes at the cell edge
will also place more burden on the system, and it
might be better to offer different MBRs depending
on the location of the homes as was done in the
past with DSL.
MNOs must understand the benefits of adding
more antennas at the RAN or the homes and the
importance of transmit power. On one hand, larg-
er cell sizes and lower densities of homes in rural
areas present a good environment for beamform-
ing. However, the large coverage requirement
could also cause a power imbalance between the
UL and DL. This must be studied since it could
result in an imbalance with respect to the num-
ber of homes that can be given their MBR in the
UL vs. the DL. In earlier generations, the place-
ment of rural BSs was done with mobile services
in mind and mostly for coverage (i.e., the trade-off
between capacity and coverage was very much
biased toward coverage). The right trade-off for
5G FWA might well be very different given the
greater capacity requirements to support FB.
Hence, if 5G FWA for FB becomes successful in
rural areas, it might be necessary to address the
question of where and how to add BSs to accept
more FB subscribers.
Another open issue is related to the sharing of
bands between mobile services and FB services.
Is there an advantage to segregating the services
(possibly through network slicing), or is it better
to keep services together for better statistical mul-
tiplexing? This is very much related to how the
network will be operated.
If a network is properly dimensioned, an oper-
ator should in theory be able to fulfill SLAs for
every home, irrespective of how many homes
are active. On one hand, when few homes are
active, it might be easy to offer the homes their
MBRs, in which case the next objective is to offer
extra rates with the surplus resources in a fair fash-
ion. On the other hand, to give every home the
MBR when many homes are active would require
a well-designed scheduler, especially when the
backhaul is a potential bottleneck. It is challenging
to design a scheduler for MU-MIMO that protects
the different services and is both backhaul and
SLA-aware, and a good compromise in terms of
performance and complexity needs to be found.
Backhaul Challenges
The MBRs expected from the RAN can only be
delivered if the backhaul is also dimensioned
appropriately. Until now, the backhaul has been
dimensioned for mobile users, who have no
MBR expectation. However, FWA services will
require MNOs to make significant upgrades to
their backhaul. As mentioned earlier, rural back-
haul is primarily based on multihop MWP2P links,
which are licensed per channel and per hop.
Due to the low amount of long-range MWP2P
spectrum that remains unused, it could become
increasingly difficult for MNOs to secure sufficient
channel licenses for their rural backhaul links in
order to meet the QoE for FWA. Furthermore,
the multihop structure makes it critical to prop-
erly dimension the hops for both users as well as
downstream BSs.
At existing sites that are already backhauled
via MWP2P, one possibility we see is IAB being
used to augment existing backhaul capacity. In
considering this, MNOs must understand under
which conditions (mmWave vs. mid-band, in-band
vs. out-of-band, MBR requirements) IAB is a good
alternative or complement to adding MWP2P
backhaul capacity. The primary challenge with
a dual IAB-MWP2P backhaul approach is that it
falls outside the scope of current standards: so far,
IAB has been specified as a standalone backhaul
technology with no specification for its coexis-
tence with other backhaul technologies. This is
likely due to the wide differences in how backhaul
functionality is deployed in each technology: IAB
employs many of the same protocols and sched-
uling mechanisms that are used for access in the
RAN, while MWP2P has its own set of protocols.
Nonetheless, steps have recently been made
toward convergence of 3GPP and non-3GPP
access (as discussed in the next section), so it
could very well be worth studying the coexistence
of heterogeneous backhaul technologies.
For new sites in rural areas, MNOs might con-
sider using a standalone IAB solution instead of
MWP2P backhaul. However, since its introduction
IEEE Communications Standards Magazine • June 2022
in Release 16, IAB has mainly been envisioned as a
way to replace fiber or MWP2P backhaul in urban
areas through the use of wide-bandwidth mmWave
bands [8]. Rural backhaul links need to be long-
range, so the key question is whether mmWave-
based IAB could meet this need. Mobility is not
of concern in this scenario, and with out-of-band
IAB, the beamforming would be very simple to
implement since the only “users” are the neighbor-
ing fixed BSs. Hence, it is important to understand
the possible distances and capacities of mmWave
IAB links between rural BSs. Even though IAB also
supports use of sub-6 GHz bands, less bandwidth
is available in these bands relative to mmWave,
and it is also expected that MNOs will need to use
these bands to increase access capacity. Hence,
sub-6 GHz bands might not be viable as indepen-
dent IAB backhaul solutions.
CompatibilitY with LegacY Technologies
While we view 5G as a long-term solution for
rural FB, it will be some time before MNOs can
fully deploy 5G to rural locations so that commu-
nities can depend on it exclusively. Nevertheless,
most rural communities already have infrastruc-
ture in place from earlier legacy broadband tech-
nologies, such as DSL or cable. Thus, there will
be a period — at least temporarily, and possibly
longer-term — where 5G coexists with legacy net-
working technologies in rural communities. A key
challenge then is how to deal with this heteroge-
neity in the network in a way that ensures the best
possible QoE for users. These kinds of problems
are rarely addressed by the research community
while they often plague the engineers in charge
of deploying such systems.
This potentially yields a situation where homes
are connected to two networks, one cellular and
one wired. This dual access introduces a number
of complexities due to the use of different technol-
ogies (in both the access and the backhaul) and
due to the heterogeneous link characteristics (e.g.,
bandwidth, latency, packet loss). This dual access
can be handled by a box installed at the home that
selects one technology or both. Note that the enti-
ty in control of the box could be the 5G MNO, the
legacy operator, or a third party. This would impact
what is possible. The technology selection might
be defined by static policies, such as the type of
application or time of day; however, adaptive steer-
ing based on the performance of each link would
be able to provide better QoE to users, although it
would be more difficult to implement. Because link
performance and user flows are dynamic, mech-
anisms are also required to hand users over from
one technology to another, possibly mid-connec-
tion, without disrupting QoE.
To support simultaneous use of 5G FWA with
a legacy technology, the box will need to sup-
port multipath protocols, such as multipath TCP
(MP-TCP). However, MP-TCP is less effective
when connection paths are more heterogeneous,
which can cause head-of-line blocking issues. To
avoid this problem, multipath QUIC [13] could be
used, but it presents its own challenge to opera-
tors: specifically, it limits how effectively network
operators can utilize proxies or caches in the net-
work [11, 13]. In recognition of this limitation,
extensions to QUIC have recently been proposed
as workarounds to this issue [13].
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Traffic Path
ATSSS
Mobile Network
Operator
N3IWF
Internet
Wired Network
Operator
Figure 4. 5G access traffic steering, switching, and splitting (ATSSS) functions
could enable dual connectivity between 5G and legacy technologies at
rural homes. With ATSSS, user traffic is routed through the 5GC, regardless
of the access technology used (3GPP or non-3GPP).
Clearly, implementing an MBR in a heteroge-
neous context is challenging — if at all possible —
and would depend, among other things, on which
entity is in control of the box.
In Release 16, 3GPP has introduced a new
set of functions called access traffic steering,
switching, and splitting (ATSSS) to support dual
connectivity with non-3GPP technologies [14].
Here, steering, switching, and splitting refer to
the network selection, handover, and aggregation
described above, respectively, where the entity
in charge is the 5G MNO. ATSSS functionality is
located within the 5GC and at the FWA modem
as shown in Fig. 4, and operates alongside anoth-
er new function called the non-3GPP interworking
function (N3IWF), which acts as the point of con-
vergence between the non-3GPP network and
the 5GC. ATSSS functionality in Releases 16 and
17 is based on MP-TCP; however, 3GPP has stud-
ied multipath QUIC for ATSSS and could support
it in the future.
An important feature of 3GPP ATSSS is that all
user traffic is tunneled through the MNO's 5GC,
and the ATSSS policies are defined by the MNO.
Thus, ATSSS puts control on the 5G side, mak-
ing it much easier for MNOs to monitor instan-
taneous rates given to dual-connected users and
implement policies to ensure SLAs are satisfied.
For operators that have cellular and wireline
networks, ATSSS could prove very useful for effec-
tively using their legacy network alongside 5G.
However, for the case where standalone legacy
operators provide dual access with 5G MNOs,
ATSSS requires the legacy operators to forfeit
control to the MNOs. One alternative might be to
have a neutral third party host the core network
functions that are necessary for convergence and
coordinate policies between the two operators.
Virtualization would make such an arrangement
with a neutral host scalable.
In the end, the 3GPP/non-3GPP dual-access
problem is difficult to generalize and might be
best solved with coordination among the applica-
ble industry consortiums. ATSSS is just one pos-
sible solution, but it is still a nascent technology,
and 3GPP is working alongside the Broadband
Forum and CableLabs to standardize the function-
ality for DSL and cable, respectively.
Infrastructure Sharing
In the past, to reduce costs, MNOs serving the
same geographic regions sometimes formulated
network sharing agreements. Depending on the
arrangement, BSs, backhaul links, and/or band(s)
83
 might all be shared between operators. In the con-
text of 5G FWA where MNOs will promise MBRs
to FB subscribers, infrastructure and resource
sharing could be all the more critical; however,
it could also be very challenging for competing
operators to provide service guarantees under
traditional network sharing policies. For example,
MNOs may bring different resources (amounts or
types of spectrum for the access and backhaul,
computational resources, etc.), so a key challenge
is to share these resources in a way that is fair to
operators (and hence users) while also preventing
free-riders. Considering this, advances in 5G net-
work slicing, enabled by virtualization and edge
computing, are expected to introduce new oppor-
tunities for sharing [15]. With regard to MEC, it is
more efficient for MNOs to utilize shared cach-
es and application servers in rural communities;
however, this leads to new challenges in terms of
content storage policies for copyrighted materi-
al, data privacy, or any other special agreements
between MNOs and content or application pro-
viders. One way to address the new challenges
in virtualized multi-operator scenarios might be to
adopt frameworks in which a neutral third party
acts as a broker to ensure fairness between all of
the involved parties [15].
Beginning in Release 17, for the case where
the coverage of an operator's 5G network over-
laps with a different operator's 4G network, the
above-mentioned ATSSS function could be used
to provide dual connectivity.
Fixed Broadband in Remote Communities
FB challenges are even more acute in remote,
geographically isolated communities. In these
regions, infrastructure costs are prohibitive, and
satellite can offer good coverage, but not neces-
sarily capacity at scale. With satellite, latency also
becomes a significant issue. Satellite may provide
connectivity in two ways:
• It can be used as a backhaul for BSs provid-
ing access within communities.
• It can be used to provide access directly at
each home.
In the former scenario, MEC will be essential to
bring functionality and caching closer to house-
holds. Furthermore, regulatory policies may need
to be defined so that additional stakeholders, such
as content providers and application developers,
are closely involved to address the unique chal-
lenges faced by remote communities [11]. With
Release 17, 3GPP has added support for NR
access over satellite (i.e., 5G coverage can be pro-
vided to a user directly via satellite) [16]. This adds
new challenges due to the latency in the radio link,
very large cell areas, and, depending on the orbit
of the satellite, the possibility that the cell could
move relative to the users. Given these challenges,
and the uncertainty of the long-term capacity of
satellite, it is unclear if satellite can be used to pro-
vide access to rural areas at a large scale.
Conclusion
In this article, we have presented new and upcom-
ing advances from 5G in 3GPP Releases 16 and
17, which we believe will enable 5G FWA to meet
the coverage and capacity requirements necessary
to offer (good) fixed broadband services to rural
84
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households, thus meeting government-established
minimum bit rate targets and helping reduce the
so-called digital divide. We have also discussed the
many new challenges related to network planning
and operation, and coexistence with legacy tech-
nologies and other operators.
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Biographies
Andrew Lappalainen (andrew.lappalainen@uwaterloo.ca) is a
RAN performance and spectrum strategy engineer with Xplor-
net Communications Inc. He received his M.A.Sc. in electrical
and computer engineering from the University of Waterloo,
Ontario, Canada in 2021 and his B.Sc. in mathematics and engi-
neering from Queen's University at Kingston in 2012. From
2012 to 2018, he was a cellular network engineer at TELUS. His
research interests are in wireless communications and computer
networking and their application for social good.
Catherine Rosenberg [F] (cath@uwaterloo.ca) is currently a pro-
fessor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineer-
ing, University of Waterloo. She is also the Canada Research
Chair in the Future Internet and the Cisco Research Chair in 5G
Systems. Her research interests include networking and wireless.
She is a Fellow of the Canadian Academy of Engineering. More
information is available at https://uwaterloo.ca/scholar/cath/.
IEEE Communications Standards Magazine • June 2022